Gods and Idiophones

Everything we do is stitched together from fragments. The world hands us an unending stream of information from everywhere at once, a mix of facts and fiction, wisdom and noise, hearsay and sales pitches. This flow has always been part of human experience, but the channels it moves through continue to shift. We absorb pieces from countless places and fold them into our understanding of the world.

Collage feels like the most honest way to work with that reality. I pull images from books, magazines, and newspapers, choosing them for their visual pull rather than their intended message. By removing them from their original context, I open them up to new possibilities. I rebuild them the way I make sense of my surroundings, searching for patterns, following hunches, and letting unexpected connections take shape. It is a giant puzzle without a reference image, guided only by intuition and curiosity.

Music is one of the biggest forces shaping how I see and think. It teaches me to pay attention to rhythm, tension, and the interplay of separate voices. I think of instruments as characters, and sounds as ideas carrying their own symbolism and history. That sensibility moves directly into my collage practice. I build images the way a song is built, layering visual motifs, repeating small elements until they become a pulse, and letting harmony or dissonance guide the composition.

Gods and Idiophones grows directly out of this relationship between sound, thought, and imagery. The series explores the place where music and philosophy meet, where belief systems and creative expression share common threads. I draw on Greek and Roman mythology as a way to look at the stories we return to when we want to understand ourselves, and how those stories continue to evolve when placed in new contexts.

Each collage features mythological figures reimagined through a contemporary lens. The titles, borrowed from pop song lyrics, act as clues for readers who want to decipher the identities woven into each piece. They bridge ancient narratives with modern soundscapes, offering viewers a way to move through the work by listening as much as by looking.