John Stezaker the Whitechapel Gallery ...

I've been meaning to go to the John Stezaker show at the Whitechapel Gallery since it opened, and I finally got round to going to see it. The show was so good I've been a fan of his collages for quite a while and they seem to have been influencing my work quite a lot lately.

What I found really interesting and important was his use of isolating small sections of images and bringing them to our attention , in this way you see things in a way that you wouldn't have been before. This really struck a chord with me and I've been isolating parts of my own images to bring to attention textures. I'm going to work with this idea of taking something out of it's surroundings using cushions as my medium I will draw attention to the places we normally use cushions by letting them take on the background, the creases of sofas and the hard lines of wooden chairs.I also really liked some of his portraits using a combination of postcards and film stills such as Mask IV. You can see some of his collages from the Whitechapel website.

Using some of his principals I applied similar techniques to my own work to draw attention to the texture of fabrics and fibres and creases you wouldn't usually see when looking at an entire image...