Various Collages —Sarah-Jane Crowson
“In the Land of Feathers Eyes Are Jewels Countless and Cold As Spring Water”
“Dressing For The Performance”
“Directives for Social Success”
“The Languages of Wings Promenades”
ARTIST STATEMENT:
Sarah-Jane's work is inspired by fairytales, nature, psychogeography and surrealism. She uses bricolage to explore the space between real and imagined; creating alternative narratives as small acts of resistance. Working with a mixture of analogue and digital techniques, she works with found ephemera, found text and out of copyright images, juxtaposing them to transform their original meanings.
Her visual poetry and art uses surrealist ideas to try to create new, unique spaces, where alternative worlds can be created from mundane or uncritical narratives. Her process also involves ideas of transformation. Collage as a medium lends itself to this because it involves working with sources and source material; literally cutting up images and re-imagining their meanings by using them in a different context. Sarah-Jane consciously appropriates text from a range of sources to form new meanings through using surreal methods or poetic techniques like erasure. The affordance of digital collage as a tool is also important to her work, not least because it enables a sensitive approach to using rare source materials, but also because it offers great flexibility when layering different images or combining images with text.
Sarah-Jane is an educator at Hereford College of Arts, a small specialist creative arts college. She is currently completing her doctoral thesis at Birmingham City University, investigating ideas of the critical radical rural in education. Henri Lefebvre, the philosopher whose work underpins this research and other critical spatial geographers such as Doreen Massey and Edward Soja also inspire Sarah-Jane’s collage/text combinations. Space, they argue, is malleable and flexible, and the poet/artist has a particular agency in creating new, possible spaces.
Sarah-Jane work can be seen in various journals, including Rattle, The Penn Review, Waxwing Literary Journal, Rattle, Petrichor, Sugar House Review and Iron Horse Literary Review. She undertakes commissions and commercial work alongside her personal practice. You can find her on Twitter @Sarahjfc or on her website at www.sarahjanecrowson.art
