Amie Dickie is an artist from Holland. She has many different styles within her work however the one that has really interested me is her cut-outs. She has an amazing way of altering a photo just by cutting certain pieces out from it. I was reading a interview with her talking about the motives behind her cut-outs...'The first cutout that I made was in New York, 2001. That was my first time in U.S. and was my first time out of the Netherlands. The impression of New York was very big, much new, impressive, and influencing compared to my home city, Rotterdam. I was overwhelmed with the huge billboards as they seemed to cover most of the buildings and the city like canvas. Most of the ads on the billboards had images of ideal and beautiful women; however they all looked very empty and superficial because they always gave me the same look. As I didn’t know anyone in New York and the only faces that I knew and could recognize were the models from the ads, so I started to project my own sort of loneliness onto those women. That’s why I started to do the dripping sort of sad drawings on their faces and cut away to find the sort of truth behind there and find personality or search where the emptiness pumping up from.'
Reading this, it made me think clearly about the reasons to why I'm using the collage cut-out method within my work, and the answer is much the same as Dicke's. These women who appear in gentleman's magazines, or clubs or wherever are almost objects, these men who look don't care about the person, and to them is just an object. These women are not easily related to, which means they are taken apart from normality, and therefore fractured and abstract.
Have a look at more of Dicke's cut-outs here.