"Jokers we know"

photocollage on paper

signed verso

I discovered collage as a medium for myself in 2017. Through my work in addiction support, I was and am often out and about in the streets of Berlin. I've always enjoyed taking photos, but the result of my photography always seemed too close to the reality depicted; I missed the playful element. At some point, I started cutting up my own photos and later found material by chance and reassembling them. As a creative form of expression, this seemed more direct and immediate to me than my photographs.
I am interested in paper as a haptic material, perhaps because I have a background in textiles from my training as a hand weaver. I detach pictorial elements from their context, cut, tear and move them until, in a montage of different components, a unified image emerges that tells a new story. An essential part of the creative process here is, in the truest sense of the word: playing with chance. Sometimes the leaves seem to fall into place of their own accord.
Our lives have become a continuous collage of all kinds of elements. We live in a world in which we are flooded with visual stimuli, in which the boundaries between truth and lies are becoming increasingly blurred. Collage is able to bring together different references in a playful way. It is often about the tension between the figurative and the abstract. The irritation that arises from this is what makes the collage stimulating in the first place.
Every image source has its own history, has been created by time, whether it is bleached, crumpled, wet, torn - or something else. The found material plays a key role in the process of putting it together. All of these are stimulating characteristics of analog work: I take it as it comes!
The beauty of collage lies in its ability to provide fertile ground for a variety of interpretations. EVERYTHING INCLUDES NOTHING!
(Ismene Grebe, 2023, übersetzt mit deepl.com)