Page 113 - Jessica K Ballantyne Studio Zine 2020

Digital Collage

f all my experiments in art making, the photo collage has been a part of my practice since I
was making art in high school. As a teenager I used to combine magazine images with draw-
Oing and painting to create surreal, mixed media portraits. I adore the immediacy of collage
and how it seems to tap into the rawness of thought. Photoshop is a really fun tool and I’ve loved using
it over the years in my digital work (many of which are studies for paintings but are artworks in their
own right too).

y themes vary for the following digital collages as they were done for specific exhibitions in
London and Budapest. Labyrinth and Woe were created for an exhibition with The Tunnel
Mcalled Labyrinth. In these pieces the body squirms and ties itself in knots trying to resist
the whims of unconscious desires. I wanted to convey a feeling of heightened anxiety or psychological
distress, of being lost in the dark woods (or labyrinthof the mind). I’ve tried to bring a feeling of balance
by using the golden mean (or Fibonacci’s spiral) in composing these artworks.

emale nudes have really formed the foundation of my subjective matter, but it’s more than just
because I like nudes. The body, especially the female body has so much meaning attributed to it
Fand many female artists, myself included use the female form to express deeply profound and
subjective experiences. These experiences can be linked to pleasure, desire, psychological and physical
pain. The body is a site of experience and I use it to convey a personal experience- always. With these
particular digital collages, I wanted to give the viewer a sense of animal desire paired with a longing for
wholeness and relief from this very human emotion.

oing from painting to digital collage is actually not a huge leap, considering that I’ve been
planning my paintings from photographs my whole life. These pieces are compositions of
Gimages taken from vintage pornography and a range of other sources which have been layered
and edited in Photoshop to produce the final artwork. Some were intended to be made into paintings at
a later stage.

Labyrinth
Digital Print (limited edition of 20)
Size: 97x117cm

#77

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