Artist: Mat Collishaw

Artist: Mat Collishaw

I found this really interesting artist that creates surreal works that range from sculpture to photography - all the works provoke a sense of the bizarre in a most beautiful way. Art Article This article is an interview with Mat Collishaw about his works, "Hard-hitting artist Mat Collishaw has long sought to drag humanity's darkest urges into the light."
This artist works with photograph showing hard-to-look-at images "an uneasy terrain of no-go areas" and I found his work inspiring because of the use of editting in his works - it influenced me to work more with my photography to produce more bizarre and unusual compositions as my work is focussed on the unconscious, mind images and issues within the mind. The artist worked with issues of the mind in one of his pieces when manipulating flower images to look as if they were decaying with STIs as inspired by a man who obsessively collected flowers, "...his flowes became diseased, like his mind was sickening..." I like using strange images to portray a mental issue, e.g the giant ugly butterfly eating rotten fruit. His work seems to have an almost dream-like quality.



MAGIC LANTERN
Magic lantern
I was inspired by this piece by Collishaw. It made me want to develop my lantern/box idea more - I wanted to show interesting and unusual photography in a display frame and a light up lantern was the best idea to show case my pieces.