When I started working on these montages, I wasn’t trying to create anything conclusive. I was circling around feelings: unspoken warnings, strange coincidences, the way time distorts when memory and media blur together. These pieces aren’t illustrations of events or ideas. They’re layers. Impressions. Echoes of things I’ve seen, or maybe only half-remembered.
“Day of Ill Omens” came together like a fever dream. I kept returning to that cracked frame and the way the image behind it refused to stay still. Strawberries sweet, symbolic, and just a little unsettling, started cropping up everywhere, like offerings or distractions. The phrase scrawled across the surface wasn’t planned. It emerged, like a warning I’d almost forgotten to deliver.
In “The Devil Is in the Details”, I wanted to push deeper into that tension between surface and meaning. I surrounded myself with fragments: surveillance footage, bullets, clocks, scraps of neon signs. The cats are watching, the skull is smiling, the power lines cut across everything like an afterthought. It’s chaotic, but it’s deliberate. Every detail is a breadcrumb, or a trap.
I’m not offering answers in these works. I’m not even sure I have questions. What I do have is a feeling, as if we’re all standing too close to the image, trying to read what’s behind the reflection. These montages are a way of looking sideways at the world, letting contradictions live in the same space. They’re about perception, recursion, and the soft machinery of doom that hums just beneath the ordinary.
Thanks for looking. Stay with them a while. They might change while you’re not watching.
Montage Works by Barry Ashworth
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