Nel Burke

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‘“Whenever we want to force this ‘photo matter’ to yield new forms, we must be prepared for a journey of discovery, we must start without any preconceptions; most of all we must be open to the beauties of fortuity.”
from ‘A Few Words on Photomontage’ (1934)

I was born in London and have lived here all my life.  My teenage years were the seventies, and I absorbed the music, fashion, and politics of those years.  I’m a product of the pub and DIY culture of the late seventies, the ‘rip it up and start again’ ethic, the postwar years of peace and the welfare state, free education and the NHS, but with a strong awareness of my parents experiences of war, poverty and years of rationing and shortages.  My generation has lived through: carrying our records round to our mates houses to listen to, to the rise of recording your own cassette tapes, through CDs to mp3’s and streaming of music – its a rich history.

I’ve been collaging since 1989 when I was a student of Fine Art at Central St Martins.  I always liked cutting out and cutting up.  After art school I slowly realised that collage was my main technique for art making. I use scissors, scalpel and glue. The ‘analogue’ is important, I want to see the cuts, the textures, the mistakes, the process.

A collage by Nel Burke
ID 55

Over the years I’ve collected an archive of materials: books, magazines, leaflets, tickets, old photographs. Collage is endlessly interesting and challenging, unexpected things happen.  You don’t need to buy anything except sometimes cartridge paper, gummed strip and glue, but mostly you use what is already in the world – old books, papers, stuff out of the wastepaper basket – collage is recycling.  Its surreal, and its cheap.  Collage is like poetry – you can bring all kinds of elements together and the art is to make them speak to each other.

Over the years I’ve collected an archive of materials: books, magazines, leaflets, tickets, old photographs. Collage is endlessly interesting and challenging, unexpected things happen.  You don’t need to buy anything except sometimes cartridge paper, gummed strip and glue, but mostly you use what is already in the world – old books, papers, stuff out of the wastepaper basket – collage is recycling.  Its surreal, and its cheap.  Collage is like poetry – you can bring all kinds of elements together and the art is to make them speak to each other.

I’m currently working with old photos of my uncle, and doing drawings and watercolours as a way of exploring and looking very closely at these images, its a way of absorbing them.  But the eventual outcome of this process will probably be collage.

Over the course of a year (2018-19) I made 201 collaged ‘identity cards’.  They began as jokey things but quickly abandoned their numbers and designations and became almost little stories from the lives of ‘persons unknown’.  Wondering what we might supply, if we fashioned our own identity document.  Would it concern what we identify with, or what once happened to us, or our potential life, our fantasy?  They are credit card sized and completely unique, comprising fragments of things collected over many years. I am interested in the idea of proof that can’t function as such because it doesn’t have a bar code, hologram or official stamp.  These ID cards are masquerading, dressing up as the real thing.

A collage by Nel Burke
Nel Burke

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