14 INTERVIEW STEVE TIERNEY
Steve Tierney
A
ustralian mixed media artist Steve Tierney creates striking collages strongly influenced by old film posters, vintage books and magazines. Through the use of re-appropriated vintage advertising images, his collages, which also exploit the muted colour pallets of the time, are warped slices of commercial nostalgia seen through an almost dystopian gaze. While figures dominate his work, they are often displayed disjointed and distorted, with faces obscured and disproportioned limbs emerging from image’s formation. Currently based in Mexico, Tierney has exhibited his work both in Australia and Mexico, with his next show ‘Without Nothing’ opening this November at China Heights Gallery in Sydney. Tell us about your process when creating new work; do you start with a found image, or is it the idea of a piece that comes first? Do you find yourself working on several pieces at the same time? I tend to have a rough idea of what I want to say, or a kind of story in my head. I’ll prepare a background, then sit down and flick through old magazines and books looking for something that helps me to visualise that idea. Sometimes I see a new image, which sends me in a whole
sitting on my desk, and I move pieces between them until it all eventually fits.
other direction. What almost always happens during the process is I will find other images that don’t fit, but trigger new ideas and lead me to start other pieces. When I get on a roll, all of a sudden I have a whole series of work. Some days I will literally go from having nothing to having four or five artworks. Other times I can go for weeks with a couple of half-finished collages
and painting. Until around 2010, when I made a conscious decision to work entirely in collage and pretty much stopped painting all together.
When did you first start using collage in your work? I was introduced to mixed media art, collage, and a combination of using words with images in 1995 when I was studying design. Before that I always drew cartoons and painted pictures more traditionally. For a long time I experimented with different forms of mixed media, silk screen
Have you found your paintings have influenced your collage style, and vice versa? My background in design and my passion for graphic imagery, like movie posters and