Shirts From a Past Life

This project assembles fragments of found text and photographs - collected over a 5 year period - into a narrative poem. Removed from their original contexts and recombined, these fragments began to produce poignant, satirical, and political resonances.

This project assembles fragments of found text and photographs - collected over a 5 year period - into a narrative poem constructed from salvaged media: financial commentary, lifestyle journalism, political rhetoric, self-help language and advertising copy. The text is composed through acts of selection, extraction and recombination, then paired with found photographs sourced from scientific archives, flea markets and personal collections. Removed from their original contexts and recombined, these fragments began to produce poignant, satirical and political resonances. I think of the poem as a kind of accidental social portrait generated from the debris of public communication. Its voice shifts between sincerity and absurdity, hope and exhaustion, comedy and despair.

This project speaks to the theme of the Archipelago through its attempt to construct new forms of meaning from the discarded fragments of contemporary culture. Assembled from isolated scraps of public language and anonymous found photographs, the work treats crisis, fragmentation and cultural debris not simply as signs of collapse, but as material from which new emotional, satirical and poetic connections might emerge. By recombining disconnected images, voices and ideological remnants into unstable constellations, the project searches for tentative new pathways through the confusion and disorientation of the present.

My work often begins with found material - archives, vernacular photography, discarded media and fragments of public language. I am interested in the afterlife of images and texts once they become detached from their original function, and how meaning can be reorganised through montage, juxtaposition and accumulation. Underlying this particular work, is an interest in how ideology embeds itself within ordinary language - particularly the language of progress, productivity and aspiration.

The images can be printed in a number of different sizes, as reflected in the installation mock ups.

*(No AI was used in the creation of any of these images or newspaper clippings. The text and images come from years of collecting).