Open Field 2 by Adam Back
Gathering Dust
Working in mixed media/collage is the cultivation of visual possibilities latent within the everyday and mundane materials of life, sometimes the astonishing and extraordinary, by which we improvise on the good yet broken world the living God has given us. The processes involved and the visual grammar generated are intended to be evocative, to create beauty and wonder and mystery, to reflect truthfully the brokenness of the world in hopeful ways, and to faithfully lament.
My work in collage and mixed media precipitated an attentive love for the material world in new ways, yielding new eyes: an appreciation, a wonder. The various practices mixed media occasions—of looking everywhere for ideas and materials to work with, of attempting to make connections past the readily apparent—shaped a way of seeing such a process of working as a way of knowing the world: of experiencing it, sharing in it, and sharing it with others. I want to create beautiful and sensuous work that calls us to the world that we have been gifted, that calls us back to the embodied life of creatures with senses. Mixed media is not only a way of my knowing the world, but of participating in it.