Collage starts somewhere. For most practitioners, that beginning is paper — a scalpel, a photocopier, a magazine. What varies is whether paper is the destination or the first move. James Bourbon and Kubi Vasak both settled that question the same way. Bourbon, based in Brisbane, builds xeroxed collages that he scales up into large paintings with brush and paint. Vasak, based in Sydney, spent years working small with original vintage materials before the COVID lockdowns pushed his toward large-format mixed media. Two Australians who found that collage didn’t stop at the edge of the paper.
James Bourbon works from Brisbane with a photocopier, a scalpel, and glue. The starting point is always research — what he describes as archaeology, digging through images for something that was lost. Those excavations become collages: stark, black-and-white, xeroxed in aesthetic. From there, they scale up into large paintings made with brush and paint. Bourbon still thinks of himself as a painter. The collage is what gets him there.
His current body of work, Debris, is on show at the Northern Rivers Gallery in Australia. Nothing hangs on a wall — everything lives on movable stands, so the work can exist outside gallery conventions. Bourbon has been thinking about Andrija Puharich, a parapsychologist who studied mind control, and what that means for someone who makes pictures. How much power does an image have over the person who encounters it, even briefly.
“The ritual is the process, and the finished pieces are the outcome; that’s magic.”
In this 2023 interview, Sydney-based artist and designer Kubi Vasak describes the break she made from her own rules. He had worked for years with original vintage materials, which kept the work small by definition. The COVID lockdowns changed that. He started building on large wooden panels, mixing scanned and recoloured digital preparations with painted layers on top — collage, paint, collage, paint. The series that came from it, Bloom Tall, centered on plants and what we put into caring for them.
“Previously, due to being a collage purist, I would only use original vintage material, which meant that my work was always small and detailed. What I loved about the new works is that I could really design and create anything I wanted to any scale. It’s been very freeing and exciting!”
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