Made up of two people, Dr.Me is a collage design studio based in Manchester (Islington Mill, to be exact). The pair, Ryan Doyle and Mark Edwards (Eddy), are most known for their 365 days of collage; a tough challenge creating a 23x15cm collage piece everyday in 2014.
In my sparetime, I work with collage. After reading their book āCut That Outā, and finding out they were based in Manchester, I got in touch with Eddy and interviewed him at his base, HOME, in Islington Mill.
Below is the full interview with ME (Mark Edwards). Six questions were asked which took 10 minutes of his time.
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 youāve just got to become obsessed with it (art/design) and do it all the time. Iād 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 donāt keep a sketchpad /laughs/. But yeah, Iād just say work as hard as you can.
It sounds like really obvious stuff but itās difficult to be specific about this sort of thing so I think just being broad and just have an interest.
If thereās a collage show somewhere yāknow, thereās a new show in London so yāknow, 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 itās mainly just having your work out there as much as possible and kinda hustling. And just asking if you can do things at first, ācause people wonāt trust you when you first start. Itās just about trying to get people to understand where youāre coming from and what work you do, why youāre 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 itās not doing anything. But it definitely does ācause you donāt know whoās 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 donāt know that, I donāt know, the head of Nike could be looking at that and thinking that youād be perfect for a campaign that theyāll do. I think, in regards to getting big client work, thatās absolutely the way forward.
About your 365 days of Collage, how and where did you find the inspiration?
I think just the deadline, ācause we set ourselves a deadline of posting everyday and so just.. I donāt know. Like an athlete training everyday, you have to like find the times to do it and the majority of the time, the work wasnāt about anything in particular, it was just you find something and think it might be interesting.
Collage is quite automatic.Weāve made series of works that have a theme thatās something relating to water or falling or just pattern designs. But the majority of the time itās just.. Yāknow, we wouldāve seen something else like when weāve been to an art gallery or go and see a show or listen to music Ā 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 didnāt 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 wasnāt 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, heās not in this studio so essentially the dynamics remain the same.
We use Slack. Itās 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, Iām 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?
Itās a grey area. I think try and use elements of peopleās images but not the whole image, if that makes sense. As long as youāre not just straight up using somebody elseās whole thing then itās fine. But yeah, it is a real grey area⦠But I think itās fine.







