Fragmentary Forms

Fragmentary Forms

by Freya Gowrley

Presenting an expansive approach to collage and the history of art, Freya Gowrley explores what happens when overlapping fragmentary forms are in conversation with one another. She looks at everything from volumes of pilgrims’ religious relics and Victorian seaweed albums to modernist papiers collés by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and quilts by Faith Ringgold exploring African-American identity. Gowrley examines the work of anonymous and unknown artists whose names have been lost to history, either by accident or through exclusion.

Fragmentary Forms, pages 276-277

Featuring hundreds of beautiful images, Fragmentary Forms demonstrates how the use of found objects is an important characteristic of this unique art form and shows how collage is an inclusive medium that has given voice to marginalized communities and artists across centuries and cultures.

album of cut-paper flowers by W. Ellen
c. 1835. Yale Center for British Art. Paul Mellon Collection, New Haven, Connecticut, USA.

Fragmentary Forms offers a new, global perspective on one of the world’s oldest and most enduring means of cultural expression, tracing the rich history of collage from its ancient origins to its uses today as a powerful tool for storytelling and explorations of identity.

Ric Kasini Kadour reviewed Fragmentary Forms in Kolaj 41.

ABOUT THE BOOK
Fragmentary Forms
by Freya Gowrley
10.5″x8.25″; 400 pages
ISBN 9798292520559
$60 USD
Published by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2025

Purchase the book HERE