Spotlight on Collage Artist Trading Card Artist Sherry Parker
Santa Rosa, California artist Sherry Parker was first introduced to collage in New York in the late Sixties, where she was a player in Ray Johnson’s Correspondence School. She has been (actively) working in the collage medium since 1987. “Collage is an adventure; a happening. The fascination for me is chance; the catharsis: discovery. As the Dadaists and Surrealists realized, collage is fueled by the unconscious,” writes Parker. “This is what excites me about this medium: the ideas which flow from chance, from a serendipitous discovery and from the spontaneous (frequently unconscious) combining of textures and images from objets trouvés and out-of-print materials.”
Parker was featured in Collage Artist Trading Cards Pack 6.
Collage Artist Trading Card packs are a tool for discovering contemporary, fine art collage. Each card is a full colour, 5.5” x 3.5” postcard with rounded corners. An example of an artist’s work is on the front of the card and the artist’s public contact information is on the back.
We asked Parker some questions about her work.
Tell me more about chance.
Chance plays a dramatic role in my work. Collage is a rush for me – from start to finish – an adventure, a happening. Each step is driven by chance: the serendipitous discovery of “found” materials, the random selection process, the fortuitous mistakes, the bringing together of disparate pieces to begin the formation of order out of chaos. At a certain point when this “thing” starts to take shape, my mind kicks in and tries to resolve what’s happening. Then, voilà! I have an image that is invariably saying something about me via my unconscious. I call my process “orchestrated chance”.
What do you try to do with your collage?
Through collage, I address the puzzle of life. Through these chance distortions, my work reflects my playfully irreverent response to – or perhaps refuge from – the “furious folly” of these times. This can be seen in unexpected and nonsensical imagery, fifties iconography (my comfort years), deconstruction and humanization of machines, and in anthropomorphic creatures uniting man and woman and animals. My work is my way of softening the world around me and making my peace with it.
Can you explain the idea behind One Trick Pony?
There was no idea in the beginning behind One Trick Pony. When I begin a collage, I just start playing, and rarely have any preconceived idea of what the image will be. In the case of One Trick Pony, I started by bringing together scraps and pre-cut pieces on my board and they started to suggest the shape of a woman’s torso. And then there was a part of a horse body that I moved into the drama. And things started to work. At first it looked like it was going to be a dance, but then I thought of a ball. (Balls, particularly beach balls, evoke playful childhood memories). So it morphed into more of a performance piece. At that point, one of my dad’s old sayings popped into my head, “one trick pony”. Then the challenge was to look for a background that worked. I have a file of photographs that I have taken through the years that I occasionally use as backgrounds. This one was taken in an art gallery in Santa Fe and reflects the shadows on the wall behind an installation. So, I reset my pieces on the photograph and pasted it up: done. The whole process took several weeks, as I usually am working on a number of pieces at a time, all which take time to resolve. (I produce about 15-20 collages a year).
About Collage Artist Trading Cards
Collage Artist Trading Card packs are a tool for discovering contemporary, fine art collage. Each card is a full colour, 5.5” x 3.5” postcard with rounded corners. An example of an artist’s work is on the front of the card and the artist’s public contact information is on the back.
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About Sherry Parker
Sherry Parker spent her professional career in advertising and marketing. For two decades, she was in account management with J Walter Thompson, D’Arcy, and DDB Needham. In 1990, she founded Parker Jones Marketing Research, from which she retired in 2007 to pursue art full time. Parker has a Bachelor of Arts degree from Occidental College in Los Angeles, and a graduate degree in French Literature from the Université de Lausanne, Switzerland. Her work has been exhibited in galleries in New York, Pasadena, Seattle, Santa Fe, Portland, San Francisco, Berkeley, and throughout Northern California. You can see more of her collage in the Kolaj Magazine Artist Directory or on her website, www.sherryparkerart.com.
Images (top to bottom):
The Journey (7″x8″; mixed media collage)
Play in III Acts (10″x8″; mixed media collage)
Oracle (10″x7″; collage on original photograph)
One Trick Pony (9.5″x7″; collage on original photograph; 2013)