My newspaper collages originally began as source material for other works, drawing on images I saw in newspapers of various displays of violence – men shouting, women crying, politicians meeting, and so on. The more I made them, the more they became a way of thinking about violence, inequality and complicated histories. The images are taken from different newspapers from India, Oman and the UK, and shed light on different ways of communication.
These different codes share my complicated point of view on the same subject, and lend to the work a shifting dynamic akin to the temporality of drawing. Through them I have been externalising a frozen political speech, never trying to make an illustration or meaning out of this voice, but something more than a dysfunctional cut and paste. The finished pieces evoke a sense of paranoia and conspiracy, an almost absurd alternate history or terrifying scenario.