We all take journeys, because travel – whether bodily or conceptual – is an inherent part of our human experience. Some of us, either through preference or circumstance, travel vicariously. These journeys are intangible; their landscapes, often based on the perceptions and records of others’ actual experiences, are shaped from images and ideas. Reconfigured, these theoretical journeys become a personal landscape of one’s own. For others, travel is a physical experience. This travel is perceived through the senses: the heat of a hot summer sun; the sight of an immense blue sky overhead; the soft give of grass beneath feet; the whisper of wind rustling through dark piney woods; the scent of wood smoke on the evening air. But this physical experience is as colored in our memories, through the events we associate with time and place, as are the seemingly more intangible or vicarious travels taken in our minds.

My work stems from strongly visual memories – snapshots – of the places where I have lived or seen on my travels. It is tied to a sense of place and imbued with my memories of the experiences that occurred in these places. Each of my images contains a mixture of journey, landscape and memory. The theme 'journey' is used in the literal sense of physical travel as well as the more abstract sense of travel through time. 'Landscape' carries the meaning of scenery - physical rock, water and sky - which can also be interpreted as a work of the mind "built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock" (Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory). The results are realistically coherent images, each containing a personal narrative tied to a specific part of my life experience. While the places depicted in my collages come from memories of my own journeys and life experiences, they also embrace a more universal vision allowing viewers to superimpose their own perceptions and experiences onto my work.

I have always been attracted to deconstructing an item and then, using those same materials, reconstructing it into something new. Over the past decade this recycling of materials has led me to the development of a unique collage technique using cut papers. I was initially inspired by the varied and intricate mosaic work I saw during my visits to Italy; in particular the Roman craft of mosaico minuto which uses broken threads of glass as its tesserae. After my visit to Rome I adapted this technique in my own work, substituting the miniscule glass tesserae with either high quality printed papers or my own acrylic-on-paper paintings, hand-cutting these materials into my own mosaic bits to the point where any sense of their former context is obliterated.

The papers I cull from high-quality printed papers are thin and allow me to overlap the pieces, differing from traditional mosaic work where the pieces are placed side-by-side. Using these papers I am able to treat each piece as if it were an individual brush stroke. In contrast, the Rives BFK paper used for my acrylic paintings is thick and I have to treat these pieces like the tessera in a mosaic. While I enjoy the flexibility I have with the thin paper, it is offset by my pleasure in using colors of my own making. The collages made with the thinner papers have a more painterly quality; the collages made with the acrylic painted papers have an added weight and tactility lent by the mosaic-like pieces.

Both techniques have their own advantages and disadvantages. Currently I am working on a series of images from my most recent visit to northern Italy. For these images, based on views seen through apertures, the thicker, more tessera-like material made from my acrylic paintings seems to resonate better with northern Italy’s omnipresent stone architecture and mosaic work, while the palette and textures from my cut-up paintings echo the colors and surfaces of northern Italy.