By Kenia Cris
Collage artwork by Delilah Jones
It was Braque, who coined the term ‘collage’ which is nothing but French for ‘glue’, many would say, as they would also say it can’t even be considered art once all you do is to glue things together. Artists like Picasso, Max Ernst, Duchamp and Dalí have tried collage themselves at their time, it was a meaningful part of modern art in the beginning of the 20th century and it’s still considered a significant means to explore ideas, communicate personal visual expression and advocate concepts.
Born and bred in the concrete jungles of New York, 23 year old Delilah Jones packed up her essentials after graduating college and traveled across the country documenting her journey via 35mm film, her first love. She has since rooted in the Pacific Northwest, calling Portland, Oregon home for the past year, taking advantage of time and space to produce magical and wacky creations.
When she isn’t hard at work at her neighborhood ice cream shop, riding her bike “Groovy Blue”, or absorbing the infinite stimulation of the interweb, you can find her diving into the divine basin of collective memory and psychedelic daydreams to create collages of wonder and absurdity.
Using discarded material found in free piles and thrift stores, scissors and glue, and a bit of the old shamanic intuition, she gives life to the forgotten creating unique and unusual narratives that are as familiar and alien as the strange world we find ourselves on. Exploring nostalgia, consciousness, love, loss, and laughter through traditional medias, Delilah is looking forward to what this electric future holds.
Delilah received her BFA in Photography from SUNY New Paltz, a little hippie school, as she herself describes it, upstate in NY in May 2009, she has kindly answered to a few of my questions via e-mail.
Where did you get the inspiration to create collages from?
I found myself attempting to recreate the nostalgia I felt for certain memories by collaging photographs together. I felt certain images yearned to be joined with others in a new context, and they did so effortlessly and with synchronous grace. I began to use any material I could find, and became increasingly affectionate for old magazines and advertisements for their time warped, ironic effects when transported into a new, unique world.
Do you work in silence?
Music is a big part of my life-process. It puts me in sort of a trance where I begin to create from a place that lacks logic and embraces magic. The Books, Animal Collective, Frank Zappa, Funkadelic, Leonard Cohen, Nina Simone, Roland Kirk and Andrew Bird are just a few of a long list of cosmic facilitators that activate the right portals. Image and sound were just born to be together.
Out of all the collages you have made which is your favorite and why?
I have a tendency to be quite emotionally attached to the majority of my work because of how potent they feel after their creative release. I feel strongest about my very first collages because they came from a place of pure necessity, intuition, and I felt like I was tapping into something cosmically significant. They really set the tone for how I feel about collaging now, and it continues to be a therapeutic, shamanic process that strays little from its original intentions.
Who is your favorite artist and how do you connect with his/her works?
Experiencing Duane Michals’ work for the first time completely changed my life when I was struggling to break away from the stagnancy of a single image. His exploration of spirituality and the other-worldly through photography was intriguing and awe inspiring. Recently Fred Tomaselli’s collages have completely blown my mind’s eye into the infinite realms of consciousness-changing assemblage and collage.
If you could not be creative through the medium of collage, what other medium would you choose?
Photography will always be my first love, and as long as I can afford to continue developing film I will see through the eyes of a lens. I also was very involved in spoken word poetry in college, and I find elements of the written word finding their way into my work all the time, so I guess if the image wanted a rest I would give shape to the universe through language.
