Memory, Remix and Kaleidoscopics.
Across several projects my work has involved taking something familiar, breaking it apart, and building it back together again.
At first this emerged through observation. Later it became methodology. Now it feels closer to a way of thinking.
Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist suggests creativity doesn’t come from nowhere
“it grows through connection.”
Ideas are absorbed, translated, and reshaped. Nothing exists in isolation; each work is a continuation of another. I’ve come to realise my own projects are less separate bodies of work and more chapters of the same investigation.
Time [The BBC News Project]
In The One-Minute World News: Deconstructed and Reconstructed, I condensed a sixty-second news broadcast into a single image by extracting one vertical column of pixels from every frame of the video.
- Time was flattened.
- Events became stripes.
- Meaning became pattern.
Sometimes a face appeared if it stayed on screen long enough. More often it dissolved into motion in the blink oif an eye.
Life is there fore seen, processed, and forgotten simultaneously. Or to align this ideas with popular culture its like remembering the last 3 reels which you watched on Instagram.
The piece reflected how information is consumed: quickly understood, quickly replaced. We rarely remember the full story; we remember fragments and impressions. The image functioned as a visual memory of an event rather than the event itself.
Identity [The Remix Portraits]
Later, in the portrait Remix project, the focus shifted from time to recognition.
Faces were dismantled into parts (eyes, noses, mouths) and rebuilt incorrectly. The results looked familiar but unresolved, like trying to recall someone you once knew well but can’t quite picture anymore.
The discomfort came from the brain attempting to complete the image.
We recognise structure before accuracy.
Here the question wasn’t what did we see?
It became how do we remember what we see?
Memory [The Kaleidoscope]
The newest work extends both ideas.
Using a process of mirroring, slicing, and reconstructing images . These photographs become kaleidoscopic structures. The original image remains present but unstable. It exists in multiple states at once: recognisable, abstract, and somewhere in between.
This feels closer to how memory behaves.
We do not store perfect recordings of experience. We store impressions, then rebuild them each time we recall them. Every recollection is partly observation and partly reconstruction. Details shift. Emphasis changes. The remembered image becomes a collaboration between the past and the present.
The kaleidoscope becomes a useful metaphor: fragments repeating, rotating, and aligning just enough to suggest coherence.
One Ongoing Conversation
Seen together, these projects form a progression:
The news works compress time
The portrait works distort identity
The current works explore memory
All use the same action of deconstructing before reconstructing.
This returns to the idea of creative lineage. Just as artists build upon artists, perception builds upon perception. We never experience the world directly; we interpret it through layers of previous images, references, and expectations.
To “steal like an artist” is simply to acknowledge this process consciously and to work with influence rather than deny it.
These new images are made from photographs taken over years of travel, but they are less about place than recollection. They resemble memories more than documents: partial, repeating, and slightly misaligned.
Not inaccurate, just human.
The work doesn’t attempt to preserve moments exactly as they were.
It reflects how they exist now.
Reassembled.
