kariann burleson (NOTPAPER (a blog about collage))

I love using vintage materials in collage, and Kariann does it in such a way that amazes me. It's so different, she uses such a variation of materials and yet she has a really fluid style. I recommend you take a look at her collages, she has such a collection!

Name (Real or Screename): Kariann Burleson
URL (Blog, Website): www.dailypoetics.com, http://flickr.com/photos/dailypoetics/
Location (Where are you from?): Midwest, USA

Q: Describe your work in 10 words or less.
A: Circumstantial. Accidental. Constellating: inspiration + intuition + paper + glue = inside story.

Q: What do you like to work with (magazines, photographs, vintage)? Be specific!
A: Graphics + words, vintage, random fragments, textures, perhaps wallpaper, book pages, calling cards, postcards, ledgers, sheet music, receipts, paintings, letters and portions of book cover—anything old torn apart. Paper and ephemera, materials that probably qualify as any or all of the following: precious, abandoned, discarded, refused, remaining, patina, sediment, stained, unwanted, underneath, behind, humble, unnoticed, mundane, found, delicate, ignored, sentimental. Found vintage photographs—I often like to use them as a starting point. I am seized with wonder—of the stories, the lives that are for but a second, captured and documented within those photographs.

l start on the note of a feeling, of wonder, and follow it through to a almost satisfaction. Old leltraset and other transfers or substances for added detail and texture or flourish. Small to really tiny fragments of text cut from books, newspapers, magazines and such as part of the story's possibility. My own memorabilia—letters, book pages, artwork, photographs. Found handwriting script and other typography, graphic images from vintage books or catalogs, paint, ink, lead, sheet mica, and whatever is in front of me really ... Circumstantial whatever it might be ... minutiae.

Q: How long have you been creating collages and what made you start?
A: Since I was a kid I have been fascinated with ephemera and paraphernalia and I have always made some sort of collage: it probably started when in class as a kid—we had that well-known assignment of making a wish-box, or found poems from images and text cut out of magazines—I fell in love with this sort of intuitive, random and inspiration-driven medium for expressing one's questions, affirmations or dreams. I started because both, I have an insatiable need to seek out and to share/translate beauty and what I see, feel or love ... I have been focusing on vintage and found materials for about 3 years or so.

Q: Are you solely an artist, or do you work in another profession?
A: Background in interior design and styling/visual merchandising. Currently working on my art and ideas for other ventures.

Q: Do you have any formal art training?
A: No.

Q: Explain your favourite techniques.
A: Play, intuition, curiosity. Allowing then going with the accidents. I never know what to do or how to do it, I just have a daily urge. I can say one thing—I really like to get my hands dirty, I couldn't imagine it any other way. Paint and glue-covered hands is typical—nothing perfectionistic about what I do. I am a lover of the "wabi sabi" aesthetic/philosophy.

Q: Describe your favourite piece ever created.
A: I like so many for different reasons, more based on my feelings about them than for their potential aesthetic quality. Right now I am most attached or moved by a recent one: I used one of my best friends grandparents' photo in it (I had been enamored for years of this sweet photo). I haven't titled it yet but it makes me think/feel of longing and happiness, imperfection and love, surging and tenderness, melancholy and preciousness (lots of things), and all the things that make life and this being human sacred and exhilarating. I like the ones that I completely can't figure out how I did it or where it came from, like, there was a message that was revealed to me more than a feeling as if I told it ... I don't like to feel too much in control then I get stuck, I like to let go. Of course most of them sort of seem that way—which is why I can't stop. Seems meditational, serendipitous, even magical then—almost essential if just for me— that's enough.

Q: What other artists do you admire?
A: Joseph Cornell, Marcel Duchanmp, Jenny Holzer, Cy Twombly, Martin Creed, Bruce Nauman, Maurizio Nanucci, Emmanuel Polanco, Eduardo Recife (I personally see them all as poets as well as artists).

Thanks Kariann!