Sean Lee
Sean Lee first caught our attention when he entered the 2023 Contemporary Collage Magazine Awards. Since then, he’s firmly established himself as one to watch—appearing in two issues of Contemporary Collage Magazine and now gracing the front cover of Contemporary Collage Book 1. With no formal art training, Sean is proof that when creativity runs in your veins, talent finds its own way to shine.
Below article first published in Issue #18 of CC. Magazine, March 2023
Hi Sean, let’s start with talking about the music, is that a full time job for you?
Yes, I’m a composer. Sometimes I’m teaching music sometimes I’m writing music for film... it generally tends to be stuff for museum installations, the last big one we did was the natural history museum, a big summer exhibition for Dippy the dinosaur, that was a really cool project to get.
I write music for one particular director most of the time, a bit of sound design here and there, a bit of teaching music and a lot of looking after the kids. That plus the collage stuff and the odd design job that comes in, I’m juggling several things. I’m just about to start doing some collage workshops with local nurseries too.
The Woman With The Dark Red Aura
Did you do a degree in music, or are you self-taught?
I didn’t do a degree. I did study after school a bit but I guess I’m mostly self-taught, I had some instrument lessons as a kid and when I was younger I was in bands and producing for local artists
Between me and my friend Pete, we run a record label in Bristol called Limbo Tapes. I do the design for their record and cassette sleeves which is kind of how I fell into doing this.
I was doing loads of digital collage stuff for the label, working digitally all the time wasn’t all that satisfying. I wanted to get my hands dirty. One of the jobs that came through, the artist was asking to be in the sleeve. He sent me a very serious portrait of himself, and I thought, What am I going to do with this?, so I printed it out a few times and cut it up to make it more interesting. I had a lot of fun doing that job and that was what made me think I should do a bit more by hand.
Did that light the spark a little bit in terms of collage?
100%, It was so nice not using a computer. It felt much more natural to me. I never really tried making art in Photoshop, I just used it to mess around and to do design as and when it was needed. I started cutting up bits of photocopies and misusing the library photocopier, moving images around on the scanner to create interesting shapes and distortions.
I’ve always had a thing for old books so I started buying more books and trying to persuade myself to actually cut them up. There’s always that moment where you think ‘I want to use that but at the same time I don’t want to destroy it’. A part of me thinks I should scan this image because it’s so amazing, but it would just kill the flow for me, so I have to make a decision that this image is getting cut up today. The book collection has definitely gotten out of hand.
I went from photocopies to using the books to explore colour a little bit more, now I use fly posters too. There’s a lot of fly posters in Bristol, I was out with the kids and there’s one wall that’s just got months and months of fly posters. Just huge pieces of crusty paper, I think it was summer time just after a spell of rain and it all dried out so it was all cracked and there was just something about the weathered look that really appealed to me.
There’s always that moment where you think I want to use that but at the same time I don’t want to destroy it
Exactly, a part of me thinks I should scan this image because it's amazing, but it would just kill the flow of it so I have to make a decision that this face is getting cut up today, but the book collection has definitely gotten out of hand.
I went from photocopies. to using the books, to then exploring colour a little bit more, now I use fly posters too. There’s a lot of fly posters in Bristol, I was out with the kids and there’s one wall that’s just got months and months of fly posters. Just huge pieces of crusty paper, I think it was summer time just after a spell of rain and it all dried out so it was all cracked and there was just something about it that made me think- I’m taking that home.
There’s an interesting thing about that, a lot of the work you do usually starts with a base image, be it a portrait or a painting etc. which is generally quite old, and then you perhaps use more modern material to then either overlay/deface depending on how you would describe it.
There’s a lot of that happening at the moment, I’ve made a series based on one book I found. I liked all the portraits and the colours of the background and I liked the paintings, I was just mucking about with the fly posters so there’s now a series of those, they’re called The Mugging of Francisco because I feel like I’m doing something a mischievous to Francisco Goya’s pictures.
In your mind when you’re doing the pieces is there kind of a context or meaning to what you’re doing or is it more experimentation and see what happens?
Initially I was just seeing what happens, so I just kept experimenting until they felt finished.
They were curiosities to me as much as they were to other people viewing them. As time went on they began to take on a meaning in my mind. Often there’s a detail like an eye or a bit of body language that hints towards a thought or a feeling that the subject may be having, I try to keep that part in or draw attention to them.
Whilst you’re not conscious of the meaning do you think when they’re finished they take on a meaning, do you feel depending on the individual that they can see into your work and infer their own way of viewing it?
I like the idea that others can infer their own meaning onto most of my work. Be it music or collage. For me the creative process is a way for my subocious to process a chaotic world. Collage lends itself really well to that idea, as I can pull together lots of source material and allow my brain to process it and create some kind of order out of the chaos.
The people in the Goya portraits were mostly royalty or very privileged people of the time. So there is part of me that feels like I’m making some kind of political statement by defacing the portraits.
Having done a bit of reading about Goya, it is possible that his politics didn’t really align with the royals he was painting. So just maybe I’m doing what Goya would have liked to but couldn’t while taking his patrons money. The backgrounds are often nearly all that is left of the original image and the backgrounds often have a darker brooding feel to them that Goya’s later work is full of.
Hand Xray 135
When you’re working then, how much of is it about the creativity and how much is about disconnecting and losing yourself?
It started as a way to kind of get into a flow state, lose a few hours not think about too much, I find it hard to just do nothing, so it’s nice to complete something in a bit of down time. The process of that is really enjoyable when its going well. I was familiar with that flow state from making music, it’s just an extension of that, finally finding a visual outlet. I never studied art or learned to draw - I’d love to draw - but collage seemed a good way to make something with my hands and not look at a screen.
Do you think there’s a crossover in terms of music influencing art or using the art to help subconsciously let the music come to you?
Yeah there’s been times when I’ve got a half finished collage on the table and a half finished tune on my computer. I tend to do one or the other or else I’ll get distracted. The process is quite similar with both. I’ll be sampling older things or degrading bits and mixing them with newer materials. There’s a similarity with both the music and collage, having old and new materials being shaped together into one new thing that wasn’t there before.
So in some respects the music is like a collage as well?
At times yes, in the composition jobs I can’t use samples but I do tend to degrade sounds to make them sound older. When I’m making music for myself there’s always old and new. I’m drawn to that nostalgic feeling for some reason. The sense that something has lived a life of its own and has its own secret history.
Where do you feel your collage work is going to go, it’s come in an ad hoc way- in through the back door as it were. But here you are and you entered the first CC awards and did extremely well, so you must think ‘there’s something in this’?Getting the feedback from you guys at the awards has definitely spurred me on and think maybe this is something I should pursue a bit more. As a result of putting the Instagram up and sharing the work, some new design jobs have come in, so it’s already become it’s own career path along with the others I’ve already got, but it’s nice to just be doing creative things. I don’t know where it’s going but I hope it goes somewhere. We’ll see, I’m just going to keep making stuff because Ive always had the urge to do that in order to express something about existing.
I suppose the next phase is to take it into project based work, such as the Goya portraits, creating a body of work rather than unconnected work.
Those portraits are going to continue because they’re really fun to make- who knows who’s going to get it next. There’s so much amazing work being made I’m constantly being inspired by all the work I see and I feel like I’m still just finding my feet really, finding what I want to do and experimenting with the source material I’ve got, but I think I’ll be doing some more of those portraits.
What about size and scale, is that something that interests you?
Yes. I’d really like to make much bigger work, especially with the fly poster stuff. I’ve started working with a printer now to make a few prints for sale and I’ve been toying with the idea of planning collages. Using my materials to print parts out that I need much bigger to create a large scale piece of work. From doing the prints I feel there would be a benefit of doing it much bigger, to notice much more detail in the work. Although, when printing them you can lose a bit of texture and 3D nature of some of my work. I like layering stuff up so much that it casts small shadows. So they change a little as you move around them.
I suppose the other thing is that you’re in the right city. Bristol is such a cultural, buzzy, arty place with lots of galleries and spaces, so you’re almost in the perfect place to just move into the creative scene.
Let’s hope so. I’m so busy with the day jobs and the kids that my connection to the art world is pretty much purely through the internet, it would be lovely to meet some people from Bristol and form a network. I’d really love to peruse it but time will only allow me to do so much networking at the moment.
In comparison to music, I guess it’s finding how to monetise your work, creating it into an income, if you’re picking up design jobs are those editorial things?
They’ve all been record sleeves and digital stuff, mostly for music releases. I’m fairly plugged into the music scene in Bristol. A few people know me and the label I work with and I think once they noticed I was trying to push the art and design thing a bit more, they’ve hit me up for record sleeves etc.
That’s a great mix, from your perspective it’s both sides of the story, creating record covers and producing music as well. With the album covers compared to a design brief I suppose there’s a bit more freedom there to express yourself.
I never studied design but sometimes people see my work, like what I do and request something around those lines, I can fulfil a brief, but I do just like to do what I do.
That’s the whole point in working in this environment, if people are approaching you saying I’ve seen your work and I like what you do and we want that style in this environment.
It’s always super exciting and it’s a really nice place to be, making music, spending time designing things for music, spending time making things just for me. Life as a freelancer is not always easy but I couldn’t go to the same place and do the same work every day.
You can see more of Sean's work on his Instagram page: @everything_has_gone_wrong