Holding It All Together: The Collage Worlds of Simone Löhndorf

There are artists who begin with a blank canvas.

Simone Löhndorf begins with what already exists.

A fragment of an old photograph. A flower clipped from a printed page. A bird, a face, a fish, a piece of patterned paper. Something beautiful, peculiar or almost forgotten. In her hands these disparate pieces are cut apart, reconsidered and brought together again, creating a world that did not exist before.

It is perhaps why her work feels so immediately at home at BON TON.

We have always been drawn to objects in which you can still see the hand, imagination and particular point of view of the person who made them. Simone's extraordinary collage wreaths possess all three.

Each is completely individual.

An Artist of Context and Colour

Simone Löhndorf is a Swedish-German collage artist and cognitive linguist based in Lund, Sweden.

Her work is featured in Glue: Holding It All Together — Collage, Assemblage & Other Sticky Pursuits, a wonderful survey of contemporary collage artists and their practices.

Her background in linguistics is not incidental to the work. Simone is interested in meaning-making, interpretation and the way context changes how we understand what we see.

Collage gives her an unusually rich language with which to explore that idea.

An image removed from its original surroundings can suddenly mean something completely different. Place it beside another image from another country, decade or visual tradition and another story begins.

Simone describes her style as colourful and eclectic, combining pictures from different cultures and periods and embracing contrast rather than trying to resolve it.

The result is work that rewards looking.

And then looking again.

Made With Scissors, Paper—and Instinct

There is something wonderfully analogue about Simone's practice.

While digital collage can offer almost limitless possibilities, she remains attached to the physical act of making: paper, scissors, glue, scraps and the limitations of whatever happens to be available.

As she explains in Glue, the process is not always the same. Sometimes she begins with a concept and searches for particular imagery. At other times she moves through scraps and leftovers until something catches her attention and becomes the beginning of a composition.

Colour may lead the way. Or shape. Or a particular motif.

That spontaneity is balanced by an analytical eye. Contrast, composition and balance constantly operate beneath the apparent exuberance.

There is also the tactility of paper itself: cutting, arranging, moving, reconsidering and finally fixing an image in place. The physical limitations of the material are not obstacles to the work; they often become part of what makes it surprising.

From Collage to Object

The wreaths take Simone's collage practice one step further.

Here the collage escapes the page.

Paper imagery wraps the circular forms before beads, flowers, feathers, miniature animals, vintage-inspired ornaments and other three-dimensional elements enter the composition.

A hummingbird reaches toward a flower. Peacock feathers erupt from a dark, jewel-like ground. Fish swim through a riot of printed marine life. Roses surround a tiny chair and an improbable crowned bird.

Faces appear among flowers. Frogs, birds and curious creatures hide in plain sight.

They are part collage, part assemblage and part miniature theatre.

And because each is made individually, there will never be another exactly like it.

The Beauty of Looking Again

One of the pleasures of collage is discovery.

In Glue, Simone talks about inspiration existing almost everywhere—not only in paintings, books and galleries, but in the structure and texture of a wall or even the ground beneath our feet.

That way of looking seems particularly relevant now.

We are surrounded by more images than at any other point in history, yet we often consume them at extraordinary speed. Collage asks us to do the opposite.

Stop. Look. Notice.

Notice the strange relationship between two things that were never supposed to meet.

There is humour in Simone's work, but also tenderness, nostalgia and occasionally something wonderfully surreal. Familiar images become unfamiliar simply because their context has changed.

A discarded scrap becomes important.

An old photograph gets another life.

A tiny object becomes the centre of an entire story.

Objects With a Life of Their Own

That is ultimately what attracts us to these pieces.

They aren't conventional decorative wreaths, and we wouldn't want them to be.

They are small works of art for the wall—deeply personal assemblages made from the visual debris of everyday life and transformed through one artist's eye.

Some are floral and romantic. Some feel almost surrealist. Others reveal animals, faces, feathers, insects or fragments of another era. Every composition contains its own internal logic, even when that logic is wonderfully strange.

In a world increasingly filled with things designed to resemble one another, Simone's work moves determinedly in the opposite direction.

No two are alike.

No algorithm could quite explain them.

And that may be the greatest pleasure of all.