The House in collage form - Research and Development

 The House in collage form.

Research:

The pursuit of photographs of the house has been a life long search. For years I have trawled through the Manchester Image Archive. It's a long, drawn out process but one I enjoy, recognise my childhood haunts from way before my time. I have easily found images of the side of the House, mainly because it was on 'Favourite Walk', a path often photographed. 

The clearest image of the side of the House was one I found a few months ago. I wanted to use this on my collage and linocut ideas. I had been reading a 5 part series on Homesickness by Gail Tolley on the Wellcome Collection website. This was one of the paths I thought my practice may take. It has been 1 year since I had visited my home city of Manchester, due to lockdowns and parents shielding from the pandemic. I wondered if this project was being fuelled by my homesickness. I have some understanding of these feelings, as I experienced Homesickness quite profoundly when I emigrated to Australia aged 15. I recognise homesickness as a physical entity. Once seen as an illness, now seen as something you just get over.

The article is worth a read and the artwork which accompanied the text was even more inspiring. The artist Maria Rivans created the collages which accompanied each article and they summed up some of the feeling discussed in the writing. The layering of photographs and illustrations works so well and helps the narrative sing out from the page, giving depth and insight to the viewer.

Maria Rivans (b.1965) is a British contemporary artist based in Brighton. She creates 'a mash up' of surrealist and pop art styles with vintage and memorabilia to create 'dreamy realms'. Working with vintage items such as books, magazine, jigsaw she has found in second hand shops she creates her art. I really identity with the treasure hunt aspect of her process and her work. This gave me the incentive to create a collage using found images as well as photographs from my past.

                      Maria Rivans Chapter 4 Homesickness illustration for the Wellcome Collection.

Development:

I wanted to create a collage using the best image I had of the house as a base. I found other images while searching the Manchester Image Archive, one of my primary school, Abbey Hey Junior and Infant School. I also found images of the row of local shops I passed everyday. These black and white images hold the past, not looking too different to how I remember them. Although they were taken20-30 years before. These places now look very different from my memories and this drives me so the time I remember is not lost and eclipsed by the future. Interestingly, the photo of my school was taken from the garden where I lived but many years before I lived there. The other image was a row of shops I passed everyday going to school, which was also across the road from my Grandmother's home. Using these photographs combined with botanical illustrations I painted of British wild flowers I layered the images, as an ode to the walks I took on the reservoir, looking for wild flowers as a child. It's a little crude and it could do with refining but this is my progress so far. 

                                    Abbey Hey Layers (2020) collage on paper by Jilly Topping

Further reading:

https://wellcomecollection.org/series/X24JnhEAAMplRFYN

https://www.mariarivans.com/news/2020/11/19/wellcome-collection-commission