Mirage, collage

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

★ Finalist, Cut & Composed Collage Show West End Art Space 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 my photograph taken in 2007 while I travelled on the bus through the Moroccan desert. Revisited years later, the photograph is hand torn, re-framed, and overlaid with acrylic paint, disrupting its original documentary function.

Destabilisation of the familiar, Mirage operates through subtle visual contradictions. The obscured surface, recalling a view through smeared window of the bus, interrupts clarity. What appears as landscape becomes uncertain, playful and suspended between reality and illusion.

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