Artist Ben Giles inhabits his own world. Themes of nature, the cosmos, and the complexity of human life abound in his lively, playful collage art. Through his wondrous scenes, the millennial Englishman transports, transfixes, and envelops the viewer. We asked this prolific creative about his evolution, his process, and the deeper meanings behind his pieces.
Crave: How did you come to find your niche in collage?
Ben Giles: Collage came about from experimenting with some video pieces I was working on in college. The videos were using found footage, usually vintage materials. I wanted to create a backdrop for the films, like a companion piece to expand upon the world I had started creating. Once I exhausted myself with the video work I started playing with collage more and more until it became the main focus of my work.
Much of what I use is from vintage books and encyclopedias, as well as the classic National Geographic from the 1950s through the 1980s. I go through large quantities of flower and tree guides and garden books. I love hunting for, and using, physical materials, rather than printing images or creating digitally. There’s a real pleasure in giving physical objects and imagery another life and another purpose to be something new, to give it a big send-off before fading into obscurity, to transform something before it’s thrown away.
How would you describe your relationship to nature?
Nature is hugely important to me. While I live in a town, it’s surrounded by countryside. I’m comfortable and scared and amazed by nature. I love seasonal change and the smells that accompany it. My fascination with nature has always gone hand in hand with history. I’ve always been fascinated by animals and human interaction with them. I’m especially interested in first interactions with nature, from explorers witnessing flora and fauna for the first time and the level of bewilderment they must have felt. I always see or find out about plants and animals that amaze me, as well as unique locations and strange trees or plants that have grown there.
How has your style or technique evolved over the years?
It began with very simple combinations of two images to creative juxtapositions or things that made me laugh. I wasn’t taking it particularly seriously. I played with more and more vintage material and began spending more time on each piece of work. Layering things where they shouldn’t, creating a surreal universe.
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Color became extremely important to me and with that came a certain balance of rules within the universe I created. I particularly diverted myself from sticking a bunch of random images down and calling it abstract and giving it a fancy title. I wanted to tell a story, to create characters within a world that can even exist without being viewed by an audience.
I liked the idea of the majority of the work being connected. I’ve wanted to keep a strong aesthetic recurrence so it’s familiar to people that it’s my work. It’s important, especially in collage, to stand out, to have a unique voice or identifiable style.
After some time I wanted to experiment a bit and challenge myself, so I started working on some collaborations with various photographers and letting myself be informed by the photographs taken into what I would then create. This gave me a much more strict set of rules but also a lot of ideas and themes to bounce off of. It helped keep things fresh and experiment with different techniques and styles.
While I still create similar collages for both commercial and personal reasons, I began to tire of the same medium and process. I decided to try to naturally evolve the collage work in scale and bring into a much more 3-D form. I’ve been using collage to create large sculptures and installations for people to immerse themselves in. I want to create work that invites interaction from various senses and directions, to experience the work with touch, to navigate the work by walking onto or around it, to trick the viewer into experiencing something.
How do you know when a collage is done?
If I’m adding things for the sake of it, or when there’s too much going on, or it disrupts the color balance.
If your collages could talk, what would they say?
“Be happy” or “Look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me” or “Jump in”.
Is collage your favorite medium to work in? Why or why not?
Collage allows me to work with limited space and easy access to materials. It’s far from my favorite, though. Large sculpture and installations are my favorite; it’s where my work has naturally evolved to. The installations are typically created using a collage style that has been adapted over time: lots of little parts of paper and other materials to create a larger whole. I love the sense of scale and immersion. Creating something big for people to interact with, and immerse themselves in, is really rewarding.
I really enjoy setting up sculptures and figuring out the best way to display them in a space and messing around with messy materials. My most favorite thing to play with was edible materials. I made some edible sculptures a while ago with sugar and cake icing and chocolate. That’s the most fun I’ve had with some work in recent memory: building it and trying to work out how to sculpt it and seeing it melt and disintegrate.
The only downside to these mediums is it requires a lot of space for building, display, and storage. Collage I can make while sitting on my bed.
