PHOTOMONTAGE
New Book Published & Exhibitions
“Hudson’s photomontages are full of an enquiring energy that dislodges the everyday into something compellingly critical and questioning about how we see the world.” – Peter Kennard, leading British photomontage artist
Something of a climax to my artistic practice was publication of my artist's book Taking the Scissors to Society - The Photomontages of Roger Hudson. Photomontage is the creative area of art where serendipity or happy chance play the biggest role, for it is the random selection of photographic images from magazines, cutting them into other recognizable shapes and arranging them into coherent and beautiful pictures that tell stories that coincidentally offer analysis and comment. Over the years of working with this art form, my worldview started getting communicated as my rational, and more often my subconscious, mind took control of the process.
Taking the Scissors to Society contains most of the photomontages I have created over my lifetime. Some 44 works are included, together with my own memoir of the place of art in my life. My account of the creative process that gave birth to the various pieces, the techniques, and how these changed and grew over the years make for interesting reading I’m told. The book was launched at the 2016 Dublin Art Book Fair, where I was able to talk about this creative process and my techniques and practice. Sample pages and PayPal purchase button are at takingthescissors.com
Gallery
Taking the Scissors to Society was also launched in Drogheda at the Highlanes Gallery in February 2017. Artist David Newton, a long-established collagist himself, featured with a great talk that placed my work in context of the history of collage and photomontage from Cubists Braque and Picasso and Dadaists George Grosz and John Heartfield onwards - interesting to see myself in this timeline. Here's what he had to say: Link to PDF
My photomontages have featured in four solo exhibitions in Dublin and group shows in London, Dublin and Drogheda. For the most recent exhibition at the Centre for Creative Practices in Dublin, 28 of the original photomontages looked great and very colourful on the strikingly bare stone and brick walls.
Works featured in this new book and more recent work are now looking for other venues in other cities to show themselves off. Contact details in CONTACT above.
Opinions about the book
“Hudson’s photomontages are full of an enquiring energy that dislodges the everyday into something critical and questioning about how we see the world.” “The book really looks terrific, printing, layout, images, text all work together so well - his explanation of the work is very true to the spirit of the images, which is unusual for an artist -
– Peter Kennard, leading British photomontage artist
“Roger’s work occupies, I think, a very interesting territory, and encapsulates interesting tensions between being images of things and of pure colour and pattern and form, and does this very convincingly in a way I admire. Interestingly, there are relations too - one might think about pattern in them.”
- Sean Hillen, artist and photographer, Ireland’s most well- known exponent of photomontage
“I say, Roger, surely to take the flotsam and jetsam and garbage and detritus and help us see something true and eternal is really something! Art has its own duty – a dereliction is to not say it, it has a duty to speak to power, to truth – an artist speaks up.”
“Roger has made a gorgeous human statement in his life’s work as shown in this presentation tonight.” – David Newton, artist
Link to PDF of The Visual Artists News Sheet March-April 2017
