Interview "5 Minutes with artist Mark Lazenby" for Charnwood, Vlaze and A.J Wells:
1. It sounds like you were a collector of random objects since childhood, which you carried around in a bag. Was this an intuitive interest or did you grow up in a household where objects were discussed and thought of in terms of origin and making?
I think a lot of it was intuitive and that we all have a natural affinity to certain things. I grew up in a household that was filled with creativity, my father was an engineer and my mother a musician so a real mix of the technical and the heart. I don’t remember ever discussing particular objects or any process of making but just being surrounded by projects, ideas and music has deeply informed how and what I do. I think that within me I have this love of doing things well and I have always felt that I am both artist and designer, sometimes stuck between the two not knowing which I am. This has also left me a bit of an anomaly to others as I don’t necessarily fit in any box, but I am making peace with the fact that I’m both.
When I was younger as soon as I could walk I would carry around an object in each hand, or a bag filled with things I found. These were often not toys but anything from plastic drawing curves (I still can visualise these green acrylic curves) to a hammer! This lead on to me collecting all kinds of things from beer mats to plastic Christmas cracker trinkets. These things were all free or of very low value so I could collect them easily, this then has informed what I cherish and use within my collage work; sweet wrappers, postcards, magazine images. Things that are easily overlooked or thrown away, unloved things that are mass produced or beautifully badly printed these things are treasure to me. I still get that joy of discovering a beautiful scrap of paper on the street or in an antique shop it doesn’t matter to me where I find it. For me it’s all about a certain quality or feel, which is why all my work is made of real things (not digital elements) it has to feel right or I won’t use it.
I have also been drawn to logos and graphics from an early age and would sit and draw the tails of airplanes and collect plane tickets when family members travelled, or stick beer mats to my cupboard doors. Objects can have a real magic whether they are high or low in value or culture. I believe that we imbue these things with meaning, comfort and value. This is where I think my artworks come from imbuing paper with feeling, meaning and spirit even if it’s just for me. This I think is deeply linked to my collecting over all the years.
2. It’s said that Terence Malick in his film The Tree of Life, created a collage effect of moments in his scenes. Do you visualise your collages from observations in real life?
I think it’s a real mixture of real life observations and the imagined, but mainly I think it is the opposite of real life, an escape and running towards what seems impossible, higher, beautiful and escaping real-life laws and confines. This is why I gravitated towards the surrealist artists as a teenager and have kept this love of their work throughout my life, because it uses the everyday to transcend the everyday. Like Rene Magritté’s painting “Time Transfixed (La Durée poignardée)” with a train flying out of a fireplace or Joseph Cornell’s sea drift objects placed side by side in a box they have this magic that lifts us from where we are or what the objects were intended for. These everyday items can be given new purpose and meaning.
We all distil ourselves into the things around us and our lives get soaked into photographs, songs, art etc, these things are simple objects but they become so richly full of memory and meaning that they become priceless and so emotive. We all do this, we all create in this way, whether it’s intentional as art or not. We are all creators, we can all draw, paint and do whatever we like.
3. You mention that a lot of your work begins with words, are there any writers or art with words that particularly influence you?
My work all starts with an internal dialogue and this is mainly through my time in prayer and reading the Bible. It is how I process where I am at and directing all of myself and energy to God. A bowing down of self, a laying down of everything. I especially love reading the biblical Psalms and Proverbs and these speak to me every day and have made their way in to many of my collages. The Psalms are so rich in joy and praise but also ranting and despair, I find immense comfort in this fact that the writers feel what we feel, struggle with what we struggle with and that that’s ok to voice to God and each other.
We are all sacred and profane, broken and fixed, dust and eternal.
My work is an outpouring of this, the battle. If I don’t give it to God and explore it in paper I don’t function at all.
The words filter through and become a heart cry, a yearning, a song, a poem and then I try to interpret these into visual versions. This again is where I try to imbue the paper with all that’s going on internally. I also find immense satisfaction in the physical creating of my collages, the processes, the hunting for the right elements to create how I feel, what I’m thinking. I make them for me to understand, but I also want to make them as offerings to God, worship.
Artists using words within their work that I especially love: Kurt Schwitters, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Corita Kent, Cy Twombly, Peter Blake, Tom Phillips, Joe Tilson, Eduardo Paolozzi and too many pop artists to name!
Over the years I have been inspired by many writers and poets in my work: Hermann Hesse, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, Gabriel García Márquez, Paul Auster, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, W.H. Auden, Stéphane Mallarmé, C.S. Lewis to name just a few.
4. David Lynch in his thoughts on death, states he sees life as continuing. Do you find that the layers of life are helpful to explore through collaging?
This again touches on what I’ve mentioned in the previous question. For me the creation of a work is the way I start to understand God’s love, cope in the world, process what I’m going through, pour it out, externalise the internal. So I think it’s vital for me to make my collages, when I don’t get time to make I feel lost and not myself at all.
I have recently been struck by the fact that we are all immortal beings. I believe that we are all eternal. We all have a choice through Jesus to live continually in God’s presence or eternally separate but then knowing He is the one. Time is short and God loves us all now, this love wants to be with us throughout eternity we only have to say yes. This quote from C.S. Lewis is wonderful: “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal… it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit”.
The call now is to love God with our everything and to love each other. This is my greatest desire and to also make what I can on any given day. I wouldn’t function without my faith, my family and my collage.
5. How would you encourage anyone with a novice interest in collaging to begin?
Creating is such a personal thing but I think it’s about tapping into what makes you you, what you love, what you have a natural connection to and then just exploring it, making a mess, making things that don’t work and when you keep going you develop your own language and you then stumble across your thing. For years I thought that I should create other work, not just collage and that it wasn’t enough. I tried to draw, to paint but I kept on being called back by the collage and I’ve learnt that for me that is enough, that collage is me. There are no rules, we complicate everything for no reason, we don’t want to look stupid or like we don’t know what we are doing. No one knows what they are doing! There are no rules. So find the things you enjoy, the things you find affinity with and run with them. Get some glue and some paper and find out what you love.
I mentioned before, Corita Kent who was a brilliant artist, teacher, Jesus follower and social justice advocate. Up on my studio wall is this wonderful list she put together that I often remind myself of and find immensely helpful when I get a bit tangled up:
“One: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for a while.
Two: General duties of a student: pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.
Three: General duties of a teacher: pull everything out of your students.
Four: Consider everything an experiment.
Five: Be self-disciplined: this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
Six: Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.
Seven: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.
Eight: Don’t try to create and analyse at the same time. They’re different processes.
Nine: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.
Ten: We’re breaking all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.
HINTS: Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully, often. Save everything—it might come in handy later.”
6. You are shortly part of an exhibit called ‘Little Lights’ at Paul Smith which opens on the 14th of February. Can you tell me a little about your pieces in the show?
Paul Smith is someone that I have admired for a long time and have had the pleasure of spending some time with over the years. He is so enthusiastic and genuinely interested in people and all that he creates, you can’t help liking him and being energised by his joy for everything good in life. So when I was invited by Katie Heller (Art & Exhibition Manager at Paul Smith) and Nico Kos Earle (Curator & Writer) to take part in the ‘Little Lights’ group exhibition at the Paul Smith Space I jumped at the chance.
The collage pieces that I’m showing all have elements based around the theme of light. So a number of them are celestial with star references and the others have fiery elements like the sun or campfires. Two of the pieces that I’m showing have directly come about from my friendship with Ced Wells (A.J. Wells Director) and have been used for some recent publications of theirs, one for Vlaze’s ‘Fired Up’ zine (that I also was able to design) and the other ‘Set a Fire in my Heart’ for the covers of Charnwood’s 2025 Calendar and their new stove brochure. Both of these works started around the theme of fire. “Fired Up” was all built around the idea of gathering together, cooking al fresco, celebrating around a fire, eating and having fun, with an atmosphere of classic mid-century design and a nod to Slim Aarons and the Californian West Coast light. “Set a Fire in my Heart” has a narrative of walking through woods and returning to a cosy fire, with references to the Isle of Wight, water and faith. Ced was brilliant to collaborate with on these from start to finish. Their manufacturing business has fire at its core from the wood-burning stoves they make through to the beautiful vitrified surfaces fired in their huge furnaces. I love what they create and the ethos of the company as a whole, so again when I was asked to work on these I was thrilled.
In total, I have around eight pieces in the exhibition and it runs from February 14th to April 20th 2025, Paul Smith Space, 9 Albermarle Street, London, W1S 4BL.
Interview by Dammy Ponnuthurai, many thanks to Ced Wells See the whole article here
Interview "Finding the Perfect Grapefruit: a Conversation with Mark Lazenby" by Nathan Sharp for Albam as part of their "Albam Talks" Artist Series:
"Finding the Perfect Grapefruit: a Conversation with Mark Lazenby
Mark Lazenby is a British collagist, with a distinctive visual language he’s developed over the course of a career spanning more than 30 years. By turns absurdist and beautiful, his work explores the tradition of early Dada collagists artists such as Kurt Schwitters and Max Ernst, but with its own unique set of preoccupations. We spoke with Mark about the gulf between physical and digital media, making work from the scraps, and being a hoarder.
I’m going to start with a pretty broad question, and ask you how a collage takes shape:
I have different ways that I work, and it partly depends on how I’m feeling. Sometimes I have pieces that have been growing for a while that I’ve made lots of notes about. I’m working on one now that I planned about three years ago, but I’ve not felt at the stage where I’ve been ready to make it, for whatever reason.??Whereas other times I’ve found something – from trawling markets or antiques shops, or book shops, or eBay – that just grabs me, and I think, “I’m gonna do something with that.” I don’t have a particular idea, but I have two things that I want to merge from disparate places. I usually keep all the outside offcuts of stuff, which I can then trawl back through and make something completely fragmented, again, without any particular plan at the beginning. Just letting it build and seeing where it goes, and enjoying the process. It’s a bit more freeing.
Does being a collage artist require a rigorous approach to filing and storage?:
[Laughs] It probably should! I know other people that have drawers in their studios that are labelled ‘Chickens,’ or ‘Fruit,’ but mine… Everything has a place, and most of it I know where it might be, but I do get to the odd point where I’ve got an idea and I desperately need a grapefruit, and in my head I know I’ve got a really amazing grapefruit somewhere. I’ve got a big chest full of stuff, I’ve got suitcases and boxes and drawers, so sometimes you’ve just got to tip everything out. Or I’ve got to go out and find another one.
Does the not being able to find something become part of the work? Can that unpredictability make it more rewarding?:
Yeah, I think so. I like to leave space in the work for there to be accidents or mistakes. I want to surprise myself, and I want to surprise other people. I do have a lot of stuff collected, but for me I’ve always enjoyed going on the hunt for something. In the early days I was quite precious, so if I did find a nice print or a postcard, or a book, I probably wouldn’t use that, I’d use a photocopy, or do a screen print or something, and then use that.??If I’ve got an idea, I need to move on it quickly, I can’t wait three months to find the perfect grapefruit. I might hunt around on eBay or go to the bookshop and see if they’ve got something, but it’s a healthy limitation and it keeps it fresh. Years back I used to do a lot of commissions for magazines and newspapers, which I started off doing by hand, but then it got to the point where, say, someone from the Guardian would say, “Can you do a piece, we need it tomorrow morning,” [laughs]. I didn’t have the luxury of doing it by hand, so most of it ended up digital. But I didn’t like the results as much, so I stopped years back. Doing stuff digitally, it had too much choice.
A lot of your work is series based. Are you letting the feel of it guide you, or are you trying to pursue any particular motifs or themes?:
Most of my stuff starts with words, so I jot stuff down, and then I do slightly terrible little rough drawings. I fell into doing series of things without even meaning to, but I find it a really helpful discipline, it kind of takes the pressure off and just means that you can continually work and play and keep yourself ticking over.??I did a series called Make Mountains that involved me cutting out hundreds of church towers from a series of old books that I’d found. I removed the church towers, and even from the first one that I did I loved what I was left with: the sky and the trees, and the graveyards, and the hedges, and then a big gap in the middle. Then, literally just by taking that and laying it over something else, I started growing a whole series of well over 70 pieces. The side bit of it, the bit that I was supposed to throw away, it became the focus.
And is it easy to walk away from a piece and call it finished?:
Some of them do feel like a bit of a struggle. Sometimes they just flow, whereas other times it can be a bit painful, which is ridiculous to say when you’re pushing bits of paper around [laughs].??I would say that I’m easily pleased, but I’m not easily pleased, that sounds wrong. I do get a good sense of when something’s finished, and I suppose part of that is having overworked things when I was younger. And that’s the other thing about working with a physical collage: once you’ve cut something out and stuck it down, you can’t really take it off. You can cover it up, whereas in Photoshop you can just turn that layer off or undo that terrible accident [laughs]. Which, again, I think lends itself to you overworking something, or it becoming boring.
Finally, I’m interested to know how your studio space influences the work itself?:
I think because I’m surrounded by all the stuff I need to make the work, that has formed exactly how the studio looks. My wife is very minimal, and I’m very maximal and a collector of things, so our house is fairly sparse apart from this room. I’m running out of space, because I’m surrounded by piles of books and suitcases full of bits of paper, but it definitely is the place where I feel the most me. I am slightly worried I’m going to cave myself in like a massive hoarder. I mean it all has its place, and it is fairly tidy, especially after I tidied it up the other day for the shoot, but if I don’t get more space I will probably end up boxed in. I’ll feature on some terrible TV show in 20 years where they have to dig me out, which is why I’ve got to keep making [laughs]. Collaging is stopping me from entombing myself like an Egyptian pharaoh.
Mark Lazenby lives and works in Hertfordshire. He has an MA from the Royal College of Art (a ‘Masters in cutting and sticking,’ as his mum affectionately terms it), and has exhibited his work all over the world.
Interview by Nathan Sharp, Photography by John Spinks. See the whole Albam article here
Interview "A Lesson in Craft: the topsy-turvy collages of artist Mark Lazenby" by Natasha Levy for "Inigo" in their Almanac section:
"A Lesson in Craft: the topsy-turvy collages of artist Mark Lazenby
Inigo speaks with the London-based designer, and cut-and-paste virtuoso, about how paper has become his playground.
It’s not often that one sees a plane bursting through a fireplace, blocks of cheese floating up above the ordered pews of a church, or a giant piece of hard candy abandoned on a beach, but in the strange, dream-like scenes that artist Mark Lazenby fashions within his collages, almost anything appears possible.
This surreal quality, of course, is part of the nature of collage: it’s a medium which allows the artist to assemble random, and sometimes incongruous elements to form a new whole. The term stems from the French “coller”, meaning to glue or stick together, and can be traced back as early as 200 BC, but the medium gained major traction during the 20th century when it was picked up by the likes of artists Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, who would use mixed scraps of paper to form jumbled still lives depicting fruit, instruments and household ornaments.
Mark’s own artwork offers a fresh take on this practice, creating strange juxtapositions of the beautiful and the banal through the manipulation of vintage lifestyle and interiors magazines. It’s a method he’s been developing all his life, from early experiments as a teenager at school to his enrolment on what his mother jokingly referred to as “a masters in cutting and sticking” at the Royal College of Art. Mark is now a full-time artist and has also been art director of the revered design magazine The World of Interiors since 2004, two occupations which he says “work hand in hand”. Below he talks more about his beginnings with collaging and the process behind his recent Turned Room series, which sees him cut-up and flip photographs of striking domestic spaces – in turn, Mark not only reimagines these rooms of the past, but overturns our visual understanding of the home.
“Reality has changed and shifted.”
“The ‘Turned Room’ series came out of my exploration of how the world has totally been turned on its head, especially over the last year, and how everything we know has changed and looks so different. Even the confines of our own homes don’t look or feel the same. Reality has changed and shifted but often we don’t see what is right in front of us.
“The series has also come out of the use of circles in my work. For the last five or more years I have been working in many different shape formats; I think it is weird that people mainly work within the confines of a rectangle.
“I feel very blessed to have had a studio space to work in, especially during the pandemic. This is where most of my work is physically made, but most of my ideas form while I am out walking or am sat in prayer. I also find it useful to allow pieces to develop over a period of days or weeks, especially for my larger works, allowing time to change them rather than ploughing on headfirst for ten hours a day.”
“I am always open to giving any form of paper a home.”
“Sometimes I have a very clear vision of what I want to make right from the start, whereas other pieces I just allow the elements to spontaneously build and see where it goes. A little like how Paul Klee took his ‘line for a walk’, my compositions grow, and I’ll do battle with them, tame them until I am happy. I love the element of surprise or mistakes in a piece too…
“I am very particular about the feel and quality of all the paper and elements that I use. I also love the juxtaposition of bringing together a sheet of paper that is 200 years old with something more recent, merging these unconnected things – it just has a certain magic to it for me. I think having this slightly disparate style keeps me on my toes and keeps me pushing forward. I don’t just want to keep creating the same piece over and over again.
“I have a large collection of old printed matter from the 1940s, 50s and 60s which is always being cut up, so I am always on the lookout in markets, antique shops and book shops as well as online.
“People will quite often just turn up with random things for me that they have found or no longer have space for; for example a few years ago I had a message from someone on Twitter saying they had four boxes full of women’s magazines from the 60s and 70s – they proceeded to bring a box every day on the back of their moped for me, and these have been a really valuable resource. I am always open to giving any form of paper a home.”
“I am fascinated with how collecting and collections affect the space you live in.”
“Apparently from when I first learnt to walk, I would carry a bag around with me putting all my favourite things in it. As I grew older, I collected loads of things from key rings and smurfs, to beer mats and postcards. I believe that my collecting habits then evolved into part of my investigation of collage – I am fascinated with how collecting and collections affect the space you live in and then how it effects your work and life.
“I always drew a lot as a child but would often get frustrated with the outcome – I always knew I wanted to be work within the creative world but didn’t know what or how. When I studied graphic design to start with at school, it was all still handmade so every word would have been cut out of photocopies of Letraset pages or drawn; I just had a natural affinity to it and a connection started there.
“Making collage is just something I have to do to be me.”" See whole Inigo article here
Article "Mark Lazenby continues to amaze with his latest collages" by Rebecca Fulleylove for "It's Nice That":
"Mark Lazenby is the go-to guy for collage that just works. We last featured the artist two years ago and since then his portfolio of pieced together artworks has exploded with even more impressive works and a real exploration of materials and collage techniques.
Having worked in this medium for over twenty years now, Mark’s ability to switch between pieces with intricate narratives to ones completely stripped back to single elements placed next to each other is really exciting to see. The variety of imagery within Mark’s work reminds us of his skill at sourcing such a wealth of papery inspiration.
Currently exhibiting at London pop-up gallery Maybe a Vole with Liam Stevens, the exhibition is great chance to physically see his artistic orchestrating of disconnected images, objects and typography. But for those not in the city, fear not as Mark’s website is just as fulfilling with an archive of his work dating back to 1993." See the whole It's Nice That article here
Article "Revealing volumes - literally, hypothetically - Mark Lazenby shows us his Bookshelf" by Bryony Quinn for "It's Nice That":
"Sharing his Bookshelf with us this week is collage artist Mark Lazenby. Prolific in both design and art contexts, Mark works with a huge range of narrative and abstract material, undoubtedly pulling from the wise words of others to help realise such idiosyncratically communicative pieces. Read on for his top five literary touchstones, ranging from Basquiat to Hesse." See the whole It's Nice That article here
Article "Celebrating the supreme talents of cracking collage maker Mark Lazenby" by Rob Alderson for "It's Nice That":
"Collage is an art-form that can occasionally carry a whiff of the emperor’s new clothes, and there’s an over-abundance of uninspiring work that seems to have little sense of itself. The knock-on effect of this is that when a real star comes along, you can spot him immediately, though we’re by no means the first to appreciate the uber-talent of Mark Lazenby. Over two decades the man has made collages for almost all the top names in media-land, from The Guardian and The New York Times to Vogue, Wired and GQ – he can also boast Sir Peter Blake as a fan.
But when the work is this consistently good, we’re not ones to eschew a good old-fashioned bandwagon jumping. Mark is able to switch between dazzlingly effective communication of a single, simple idea and more convoluted pieces which hint at several narratives simultaneously, plus he uses typography in a really interesting way. Why not lose yourself in his website for an hour/afternoon?" See the whole It's Nice That article here