Shapeshifting: James Rogers

Recently, I built a new shed specifically for my 2D work and started making collage. I prepared the material with an eye to simulate a feedback loop with the logic of my welded steel sculpture, the cut pipe of my ‘Tubism’, as coined by Louis Vauxcelles. Initially, I painted rhythms on heavy craft paper, choosing which to be an active ground and which to be source material. With a repetitive approach, the cuts sought volumes to ‘shape and shift’. I had discreet pieces, abutments and bridges, with finite edges of colour and tone, to work in compliment and counterpoint with the base image. Arrangements could be temporarily shuffled before starting to fix down, then the pulse could be followed and like a song, each would run to a conclusive cadence.

Further developments in scale, along with atmospheric grounds, produced new rhythms. Later again, a change of material was employed in the form of discarded printed canvas banners. A photo image became the pulse in the base. Fragments of the source material, modified with paint, became the new ‘volume’ to build with. This show selects across the range of encounters.

Two trips to tropical Queensland in recent years had residual influence on reflection. Inside the barrier where the surf doesn’t dominate, reef and coral lay submerged under the daydreams as the sequence of collages sought breath and breadth. Things growing and swimming below the surface take on new awareness, glimpsed and lurking in echoes of movement over changing depths. Back on land and in the shed, the silence is broken with re-runs of the mixed tape, with occasional wow and flutter, coming through the open door of my van on blocks, Island Life.