Nel Burke

ArtistStudio - ClublandBStudio - Independent

Nov 13

Written By Camberwell Arts

Virtual Open Studios

Artist Statement

Nel Burke is a collage artist using analogue cut and paste techniques to create small works, mostly in series. She exhibits her work on instagram as @bangomylife

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More about the artist

Nel was born in London and has lived here all her life. Her teenage years were the seventies, and she absorbed the music, fashion, and politics of those years. Shes a product of the pub and DIY culture of the late seventies, the ‘rip it up and start again’ ethic, the postwar years of peace and the welfare state, free education and the NHS, but with a strong awareness of her parents experiences of war, poverty and years of rationing and shortages.

Nel’s generation has lived through: carrying their records round to mates houses to listen to, to the rise of recording their own cassette tapes, through CDs to mp3’s and streaming of music - its a rich history. Nel has been collaging since 1989 when she was a student of Fine Art at Central St Martins. She always liked cutting out and cutting up. After art school she slowly realised that collage was her main technique for art making. She uses scissors, scalpel and glue. The ‘analogue’ is important, she wants to see the cuts, the textures, the mistakes, the process.

Over the years Nel has collected an archive of materials: books, magazines, leaflets, tickets, old photographs. “Collage is endlessly interesting and challenging, unexpected things happen. You don’t need to buy anything except sometimes cartridge paper, gummed strip and glue, but mostly you use what is already in the world - old books, papers, stuff out of the wastepaper basket - collage is recycling. Its surreal, and its cheap. Collage is like poetry - you can bring all kinds of elements together and the art is to make them speak to each other” Nel is currently working with old photos of her uncle, and doing drawings and watercolours as a way of exploring and looking very closely at these images, it is a way of absorbing them. But the eventual outcome of this process will probably be collage.