Allan Haverholm
@haverholm

I started out in comics a couple of decades ago and, to my mind, that is the practice that I continue still. Although I have long abandoned the cultural genre aspect of comics, their formal basis persist in my work: montage and accumulative juxtaposition of visual elements.

In my work, that juxtaposition serves as a visual model of abstract concepts such as the combinatory nature of creative processes, and the sometimes fraught means of conveying subjective experience between people.

Through reduction of motive and narrative, I have arrived at the non-figurative collages that I work with today. I see that development as a freedom to express myself in a form unfettered by story or linearity – a reading experience more like that of maps than of text, and as an exploration rather than finding the quickest way from A to B.

In effect, I create worlds for a reader to get lost and find their own way in. I remain fascinated with printed and bound media, which I consider a pocket (or coffee table) gallery. Those atlases, as it were, are both more permanent and more ephemeral than an exhibition of the same works, as a book may change owners multiple times over its life span.