Scott

Cottrell

Scott Cottrell is an artist and designer whose work uses fax machines to combine various media, resulting in a time capsule “reaching into the past to help make sense of the present, or at least make it more tolerable.” His collages use typography in fresh ways, abstracting words and phrases to create poetic fragments that bond each element of the piece.

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I grew up in the 80s, and I think the romanticism of that era is ingrained in me to this day, so that sensibility usually finds its way into my work. Emotion is also an important aspect of my work. I want there to be an emotional connection to the work. Nostalgia is also something that is increasingly informing my work, which I believe is the reason I gravitate towards vintage imagery and colors. I love combining vintage photographs and magazines with printing mistakes and other ephemera. The type is printed out, distressed, picked apart, and then reassembled. Images are printed out and run through fax machines and copiers and recombined (or not) with the original image to create something new, yet somehow still the same (in a sense). Layers and layers are built up and manipulated. Leftovers and left-behinds. Just like life.

Scott Cottrell

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Scott Cottrell was born in 1969 in Parkersburg, West Virginia, where he still lives and works today.

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