Miranda

Millward

Soft pastel colors from the past fill the pages of Miranda Millward’s paper collages. In her work, she explores themes of serendipity, memory, and nostalgia. Geometric shapes sit against hand-torn edges, where vintage advertisements are obscured in odd and unexpected ways. The ability to look deeply is the root of creativity, and in these works, we find ourselves lost in the layers that Millward has composed.  

Collage, to me, means making sense of the present by processing the fragments of the past. Collage enables me to make new meanings from the old, discarded, and abandoned. Collage is made of real life and has the power to pierce our individual and collective memories that are always in part real and overlaid by our imaginations.

Miranda Millward

My work has always played upon memories real and imagined, individual and collective and the place where these memories overlap but also diverge. In life and as an artist I am fascinated by serendipity and nostalgia in terms of what we decide to preserve and in what we abandon. I am only interested making analogue collages. For me, analogue collage is a haptic process because, it is about using the real scraps of the past - the papers and ephemera of everyday life to create echoes of remembrance that hint at a narrative but cannot tell the whole story.

Collage is made from the real fabric and materiality of society – the souvenirs and the mundane articles of daily life that pay tribute to lives lived and times past many of which remain close but also somehow elusive. My subject matter is often rooted in the feminine. The lives lived by women past and present; the positions they have occupied in society and female sexuality are often reference points. There is often a surface gloss to my work that belies a more complex and nuanced narrative. Colour is an important unifier within my practice to corral together what often appears fractured, chaotic, disparate and uncertain. The notion of the ‘echo’ is important to me - my work it echoic – there is a repetition of subject matter, references and themes.

I say very little about individual works and invite the viewer to make their own sense of what they see. Within my work several palimpsest-like layers are covered over and obscured - they sit beneath the final picture plane the viewer eventually gazes upon. These layers built from hesitation and indecision in turn create other fractured narratives that will remain incomplete and hidden from view. The work is always small – rarely more than 6 x 8¼” - which creates an intimacy with the viewer – who by looking closely - can navigate the fragments and enable their own narratives to emerge that may be both fictitious and real.

Courtesy of Miranda Millward

Miranda Millward was born in 1976 in Birmingham, UK. She is currently based in Oxford, UK.