Intimate collages
Collage has long been regarded as an intimate method of art-making. From the early experiments of British Victorian women, and their compositions of photographs and watercolours, to methods of patchwork and quilting used by 1960s African-American women as a means to depict Black-American narratives, collage can become a conduit for fragmented narratives of personhood, environment and place. Moreover, collage can become a practice of ritual in which the material may be a portal to access memory, both personal and collective. In lick of a tongue, collage appears across the pages in disparate yet conjoining ways, used not simply to reassemble collated images but to restore them in the present time.
In one example, spread across a two-fold page, Scarville brings together three distinct image forms and visual languages – the archival, the hand-drawn, and the found image. In a format which reoccurs throughout the book, on the far-right side of the page, we see a small, square digital image of a golden object which embodies anthropomorphic qualities, existing as not quite still, and not wholly animated. The object stands with its weight on one leg, its delicate carvings made visible by the deeply shadowed yet still golden marks.
As we move anti-clockwise, we land on a photograph of a man who might be related to Scarville, the image bearing some of the hallmarks of a family archive print; it looks like an identification photograph, perhaps a passport photograph, though it’s shot in black-and-white. The man’s eyes stare directly into the lens but, leaning closer in, we can see a peculiar oval-shaped dent which contains another mouth, similar to that of the man photographed, but also an edge which dislocates itself from the wider image. It’s an intervention that contorts the photograph within the original.
The final visual component of the page takes on a different language as we see what appear to be hand-drawn circles, slightly imperfect and beginning to morph into spirals as they build and exist within one another. For me, these spirals become the meeting point of the two other images, a marker and direct extension of Scarville’s own hand.
In this personal mark-making, I feel an interrelation at play between body, time, performance, memory, and production, each making a statement towards a philosophical perception, intertwining and enacting an ecology of past and present, ancestry and death. They are concerns across Scarville’s practice but in this instance, her hand becomes a portal, a passage, and a way of movement into these images. In doing so, she creates an atlas of images devoid of linear chronology, and in perennial transformation. What does it mean for these images to be compiled in such a specific form?
In his 2021 essay Spectres and Textures: The B-side Wins Again, writer and photographer Johny Pitts asks what it might mean to read images in an “off-beat” approach within a context of (in)visibility, and how such an approach may be used to foreground those who inhabit the presumed margins. The B-side takes its name from records which, traditionally, have primary A sides and more secondary, less noted B sides. For Pitts, Black practitioners have often championed the latter, “because of their enforced proximity to it”. “Stories outside the stories, unofficial narratives…Hidden, spectral stories,” he continues and, for Pitts, these are the B-sides.