Mark Hearld - Collage Con Brio! -

It's really hard to sum up the things that inspire me. I think of myself as pretty chaotic. Out of chaos comes creativity. This film should give people an insight into my day, but it also should give people a way into the way that I think and perhaps more importantly that, to what I notice and what I see. I'm Mark Hurld. I live here in York. I'm an artist and designer. I'm a collage maker. Everything that I do is to do with looking and responding to the visual world. Definitely I find inspiration in all kinds of things. It's the mixture of things that makes life exciting. Yes, I suppose I do live inside a collage. To somebody that doesn't know me, it might look like the things surrounding me are random, but actually they fall into quite specific categories. I'm interested in the English popular arts and I actually love going to a car boot sale and just searching for objects. There's an analogy to be made between the way I place things in the house and the way that I actually make collages. I get into the studio, so I'm surrounded with materials and I think the materials are what suggests the possibilities creatively. You know, it might be a particular colour or the shape of a piece of paper that acts as a starting point. If you've surrounded yourself with things, then it's really easy to pick up and actually begin doing something. If there's papers all around, those papers offer up solutions. You know, your eye sees a piece and puts it with another piece and then it gives you ideas visually. All the work that I've made has come out of that approach, so it must work in some way. If you're knowledgeable about material things in the world, it helps you design and make things well because you know, you understand an object or a shape or the inherent qualities of a thing and I think that transfers into your creative practice. I just use the word practice. I hate that creative approach. I'm working on a big exhibition for the Scottish Gallery called Collage Con Brio. Brio is the name of my dog, but it means life, verve, oomph, energy. I'm really excited about this piece of work. It's quite new and it's really open. It's mostly paint and oil bar mark and I love the kind of visceral quality of these oil bars here. It's basically about September allotment with the sunflowers going over and it was wonderful to just make it in a really direct and gestural way. This is the frame that I've done. The small marks here are supposed to be a kind of counterpoint, a foil for all of those big gestural open marks. So I'm quite excited about the dynamic tension between the two things. So I never really have a plan. I just respond to the last collage and usually that gives me the idea for the next piece. You've just got to be confident and do it the way that you always do it and that works for you. The visual world is exciting, but on a day-to-day basis, it's bits and pieces around my house and being in nature on the dog walks that make me feel creative. I want people to see how making is different from... Oh no, let me do that again. God, it's hard.