#dr.me.interview

What advice would you give to a graduating student of Art or Design? For example, being a collage artist, what would you say to another wanting to follow the same path?

I think you’ve just got to become obsessed with it (art/design) and do it all the time. I’d say obsession and just being really interested in the field is a must. Just trying to practice all the time, keep a sketchpad, although I don’t keep a sketchpad /laughs/. But yeah, I’d just say work as hard as you can.

It sounds like really obvious stuff but it’s difficult to be specific about this sort of thing so I think just being broad and just have an interest.

If there’s a collage show somewhere y’know, there’s a new show in London so y’know, make sure you go and see that. And yeah.. Just be interested and stuff.

I read your book as I mentioned in the email, and you mentioned that you worked with quite big clients (Sony, Redbull, etc). How have they found you?

I think a lot of it is kinda down to chance, that it’s mainly just having your work out there as much as possible and kinda hustling. And just asking if you can do things at first, ‘cause people won’t trust you when you first start. It’s just about trying to get people to understand where you’re coming from and what work you do, why you’re making it.

Having things like a website, Instagram, Twitter, all that stuff is definitely something you need to do. A lot of people poo-poo and so it’s not doing anything. But it definitely does ‘cause you don’t know who’s looking. Just because it may seem lame to be posting images of your work all the time, it may not get a big hit back from it. You don’t know that, I don’t know, the head of Nike could be looking at that and thinking that you’d be perfect for a campaign that they’ll do. I think, in regards to getting big client work, that’s absolutely the way forward.

About your 365 days of Collage, how and where did you find the inspiration?

I think just the deadline, ‘cause we set ourselves a deadline of posting everyday and so just.. I don’t know. Like an athlete training everyday, you have to like find the times to do it and the majority of the time, the work wasn’t about anything in particular, it was just you find something and think it might be interesting.

Collage is quite automatic.We’ve made series of works that have a theme that’s something relating to water or falling or just pattern designs. But the majority of the time it’s just.. Y’know, we would’ve seen something else like when we’ve been to an art gallery or go and see a show or listen to music  that has rhythm to it. That would kind of feed into the work.

What is it like working independently alongside other creative minds? What is the community like?

Really good. I moved with Ryan and Steve from Hope Mill in Ancoats. And it was fine, it was a nice place. But we just had nothing going on, there was no community level there. Everyone that had studios there did work that was quite desperate. We didn’t really know anybody that well, and you found when they ran open studios, people will just come in and start painting the walls, putting pictures up.. Just for appearance sake. Aside from that, there wasn’t anybody that we kinda sparked with. So coming to this mill was quite a natural move.

It was great, we moved in here. We were next door to TEXTBOOK and JOHN POWELL-JONES. More and more friends moved in and this place (HOME) became available so we all decided to pitch in and come over here.

I heard on Nicer Tuesdays (YOUTUBE VIDEO) that you now work with your partner, Ryan, through the internet. How is that working for you two?

Ryan was in the south of France but he has now moved back to Manchester with his wife. But we still do work through the internet, he’s not in this studio so essentially the dynamics remain the same.

We use Slack. It’s like a business messaging app, kinda similar in between Facebook Messenger, but we WeTransfer thrown in so you can send quite large files quickly. We just send projects back and forward. We work fairly independently anyway, so when a job comes in, we chat about it via Slack, just get on with it independently, put ideas together, feedback, then send it off to the client.

In my sparetime, I’m progressing on into the world of collage, however I fear copyright laws quite a bit when I think about selling. I would like to know what you think about the matter of Copyrighting for collage artists?