Cardboard Cities
Collages of cauliflower sunsets, horse gibberish and bikini babes
Piecing together scenes from dreams and reruns of Twin Peaks and The Twilight Zone, Welsh collage and mixed-media artist Laura Redburn creates vibrant vignettes on paper under the moniker Cardboard Cities. Her portfolio flows like a nostalgic scrapbook tinted with just the slightest hint of patina, but pierced with bright colors to enhance the otherworldly scenes.
Part of the appeal of collage work lies in its reconfiguration of the banal, and Redburn’s process speaks to her ability to shift reality into something a bit more magical. “Often when I’m watching something,” she says, “I have trouble focusing on what’s happening because I’m so distracted by the scenery, or the colors in the shot, or just the way the shot has been composed.” As a result, we’re introduced to aerial cityscapes overlaid with geometric patterns, sunbathers with fried-egg heads, poshly dressed partygoers watching a cauliflower sunset over a mountain range, lavender horses rolled out in rows and chopped-up text spelling out an alien abduction.
Cardboard Cities prints are available online from $18. To see more of Redburn’s work and follow her blog, visit her website.
