In 2004 and 2005 I exhibited about 76 collages

Along with the smaller collages I exhibited one huge one. (These photos are not good)

About the Big Collage

The Big One is totally made up of other peoples paintings, all depicting scenes of conflict -  sieges, battles, disasters, fights, galloping hooves, elephants running amok, people battling wild animals, conflict and chaos from all places and all times jammed together into an epic free-for-all Ö I marvel at the way artists treat this subject matter with a heavy mix of revulsion and enthusiasm. I wanted to express the notion that violence and insanity is the same thing. I am very bothered by Australiaís willingness to mix itself up in wars, and my disquiet helped drive me through this project until it was finished. I wanted to make it as dense as I could, a Cecil B De Mille epic in every square foot. The collage was quite a big undertaking. Some sections were easy and came together fast and have stayed much the same. Other bits were difficult and slow, and needed much more changing and altering before I was happy. The piece has been made on a pair of plywood doors that are held together by the wooden frame, and the clear sheet over the top is perspex. The whole thing is about 1900 mm X 1750 mm. It was finished a few months ago, making it the most recent collage in the show. The larger figures in the lower middle are all from 80s Thai movie posters.  The rest is material, which I either had lying around, or stuff I hunted for. Thereís lots of well known painters represented: Goya, Bosch, Delacroix, Ucello, Michelangelo, Dali, Breugel, the wild west paintings of Remington, as well as the work of a range of illustrators and artists from different places and eras. The frieze across the top and most of the bottom is all from a book of frescoes depicting the siege of Malta. In the space between these friezes,  I tried to create a scene which appears to recede further and further into the distance, with the biggest characters at the bottom and pictures getting progressively smaller as they lead up to a set of distant blazing horizons at the top