Between air and water: the collages of Daniel Attwell

What am I doing here? 2019. — *What am I doing here?* 2019.

The hand-cut paper collages of the eternally nomadic Daniel Attwell – currently picking olives in Spain – inhabit a dreamlike world of perpetual aurora borealis reflected across still lakes with Peter Doig-like canoeists and snowy mountains.

A new generation of collage artists have rejected the digital temptation and returned to collage’s roots: scissors and glue. But what distinguishes Daniel’s collages from numerous other practitioners of the art is a thematic consistency usually only reserved for painters and filmmakers: lonesome travellers forever gazing in multi-layered landscapes or in a canoe traversing desert or galaxies are to be found repeatedly in Daniel’s strange, beautiful creations. Women appear as giant, ethereal aliens. The city, when it does feature, appears as a claustrophobic nightmare. It’s hard not to draw autobiographical conclusions from his artwork.

Daniel, 45, has been creating artwork in a variety of media for many years but it seems only in the last couple of years his collage work has really hit its stride. He remains modest about its commercial viability. “It’s just a hobby,” he’ll say when people suggest he should make cards or posters from them. Meanwhile, nature is his biggest passion and inspiration, and he prefers the outdoor life to any semblance of settling down and working at a desk-bound job.