Judy Engle

Many artists work in an intentional way. In my case, I am guided by my love of ordinary materials at hand, especially “found paper” such as newspapers, magazines, advertising flyers, postcards, as well as bits of my earlier work, photographs, prints, and drawings. A special thrill of collage-making is in combining disparate elements to form something new and coherent and unexpectedly right. This hands-on approach feels to me like a way of recreating the domestic and functional arts and crafts of my family. In their case, it was using and reusing scraps of wood, metal, fabric, yarn, and thread to create the beautiful and useful objects of our daily lives on a small farm. They included furniture, clothing, toys, home decorations, and other household and personal items. It is the act of transforming that which may seem mundane, in some eyes even ugly, and which in other hands may have been discarded, into something eminently reclaimable.