Belles Lettres: Collage in the Age of Covid

Runs 12 – 22 May 2022
Opens World Collage Day
Saturday 14 May / 2 – 4pm

Karen Profilio . Judith Andrews . SE Rosenberg .
Barbara Rooke . Frances Roberts . Dominique Baldock .
Liz Nurthen . Jennifer Buffier . Glynis Poole . Kate Hart

To celebrate World Collage Day we have ten Sydney-based collage students come together for this group exhibition.

During the unique and uncertain time of the Sydney lockdown these students of the Workers Educational Association (WEA) were delivered online weekly Collage classes with Visual Arts Teacher Brendan Vivian Smith. During the weeks of the stay-at-home lockdown the group created Collage artworks with limited at-hand images, materials, and paper. Collectively the group created new horizons, stories, and imaginings that brought beauty into their lives and kept their World large. Belle Lettres: Collage in the Age of Covid celebrates this work.

Karen Profilio

A Visual Arts educator for over 40 years Karen has enlivened and enriched the range of creative possibilities available to her students from year 7 to the HSC in their art-making. In her own work she shows a penchant for colour, layering, positive and negative space, pattern, text and street art, aspects of which are evident in her current collages. She has been stimulated and challenged by Brendan in the briefs and artists introduced in this course. Developing, sharing and refining ideas has always been germane to her practice.

Judith Andrews

Judith Andrews was born in Sydney and lives in Sydney’s south-east. Following a career mainly in Office Administration, she was delighted to find a much more creative use for paper via the WEA Colour & Collage class and looks forward to further developing her technique in the medium of collage.

SE Rosenberg

SE Rosenberg was born in Sydney and currently lives in the Inner West. For many years she worked as a Visual Arts teacher in an inner city Primary school. Photography is one of her many passions which is applied in her collage practice. Her intricately detailed and quirky collages are heavily influenced by Japanese architecture, nature and textures.

Barbara Rooke

“Splicing together disparate images and fragments of colour and text have allowed my book editor logical left brain to quieten – and to generate meaning from my subconscious, as Braque and Picasso believed they did in their collage practice. Collage takes me to a new place that’s a creative – and disruptive – force in my visual culture and is encouraging to the way one can reimagine the world. My Ikebana practice too feeds into my abstract structural imagination in collage and assemblage, producing as it does balance, harmony, the punch of negative space and the acute impact of the right colours, all making a work sing.”

Frances Roberts

“I love colour and design. Something I have enjoyed for years as a garden designer. When I encountered collage it inspired me to explore my visual language so much more of colour, shape and complexity; and allowed intuitive design to emerge from the simplicity of scissors and paper. It is frequently challenging often fun and an art form that rewards one with a valuable satisfaction.”

Dominique Baldock

Dominique Baldock is a Sydney based Analogue Collage Artist, who has been enthusiastically cutting and pasting since around 2013. With a background in high acuity Paediatric Nursing, art represents an escape – a moment of peace from her hyper vigilant mind. From this quieter place an intuitive unfolding of the work emerges. An interest in meditation and connecting with nature, also informs this process.

Dominique’s work creates a sense of playfulness, storytelling and the unexpected. She enjoys rescuing images and reimagining them into a new life. Her collages can be recognised by the use of vintage figurative images – often black and white photography placed alongside nostalgic colours and tones.

Liz Nurthen

Liz studied biology at Macquarie University and had a 13-year career at the NSW Department of Agriculture. She did however, eventually return to her first love of music and spent many years as a freelance Oboe performer and teacher.

In 2009 Liz signed up for a Collage class at WEA and found it to be highly creative and stress relieving. She enjoys combining disparate images in her collages to convey an environmental message with a sense of humour. She is interested in what appears to be real even though it may be an illusion. Liz resides in Sydney.

Jennifer Buffier

Jennifer came to collage after a successful career as an ancient history teacher and running a business designing and making cushions out of antique fabrics and trims. On overseas holidays she had great fun scouring flea markets and antique shops. It was a challenge to transform pieces of antique tapestry and faded braids into something rare and beautiful. Now, she searches through second hand shops for old books and papers, and she employs in her collage many of the same techniques of layering and transformation.

Many of Jennifer’s collages are figurative and inspired by the distant and more recent past. “Seems I’m stuck in a bit of a time warp. All those ancient history lessons” she says. Jennifer’s collages are full of mystery enticing the viewer to imagine a back story.

Glynis Poole

Glynis Poole’s goals as a teacher and librarian was to provide the keys to knowledge. Now collage has become her key to seeing the world’s unexpected minutiae through a fragmented eye. For Glynis Collage brings the joy of creation and the opportunity to contemplate deeper emotions and concepts.

Kate Hart

Kate lived and worked in Western Australia and Victoria in Art Education for Government Education Departments, as well as a private company Zart Art. She has held art workshops in all areas of art education, and produced written information in notes and booklets. Her last publication: “Art Skills Handbook F – 6 : Sequential Planning Guide for Teachers”, was published in 2017, alongside final art education workshops across Victoria. This publication was also translated & printed for The Chinese Education System.

During these years Kate had regular exhibitions of her own painting and drawing artworks with a focus on portraiture. Now residing in NSW Kate founded textile workshops at Geelong Grammar School. Maybe collage with fabrics is her next step into the future.