British collage artist Maria Rivans describes her artistic process as piecing together an unruly jigsaw puzzle. An avid collector of vintage ephemera, scavenged from antique books and retro magazines, Rivans work includes a lot of assembling and reassembling, until an image begins to take shape.
A hybrid of Surrealism and Pop-Art, her finished pieces reflect her love for pop culture and Hollywood glamor, incorporating into her work anything from vintage Hollywood to 1970s sci-fi, B-movies, and trash TV. Through Rivans’ creative alteration, new film plots and narratives come to be, and an alternative, mashed up universe of sorts, begins to form.
Rivans suggests that her use of collage reflects the complex and fragmented world from which her art arises. But according to her, her attention to beauty and to the harmony of composition gestures optimistically towards the social capacity to piece it back together again.
Ranging in theme and in size, her artwork can take months to complete, as she assembles the cut-out fragments and scraps, laboring over long periods, and making alteration after alteration. But with hundreds of fans both online and offline, her hard work seems to have paid off.
