Mirage

‘Mirage’, 2024. Collage, Acrylic paint and C-Type Kodak Professional Endura print on canvas, varnish. Unique state. Framed size 32.5 x 32.5cm 

★ On show at West End Art Space Cut & Composed 4 – 24 July 2026

Artist statement

Mirage is a collage-based work that brings together photography and painting to explore memory as a fragmented and shifting construct. The image originates from a photograph taken in 2007 while travelling through the Moroccan desert, during a period of personal transition shaped by migration. Revisited years later, the photograph is cut, re-framed, and overlaid with acrylic gestures, disrupting its original documentary function.

Destabilisation of the familiar, Mirage operates through subtle visual contradictions. The obscured surface, recalling a view through smeared glass, interrupts clarity and invites doubt. What appears as landscape becomes uncertain, suspended between recognition and illusion.

Through layering and re-composition, the work reflects on the instability of memory and the way lived experience is continuously edited over time. Mirage suggests that meaning is not fixed but constructed, where fragments of the past are reassembled into new and shifting narratives.