The starting point for all the montages is the second hand bookshop or charity shop. Each shop is like a group portrait of the people who live in the area. Originally published around the world and possibly bought while on trips elsewhere, these books end up in this particular shop because their owners had a relation to this region. 

As well as being a place to make art, the studio is a store room for my growing archive of second hand books. A series of montage gets started only after spending a lot of time looking through piles of books. It is the archive of photographs organised within a collection of books that is, in effect, the world that I observe when I am initially deciding what to make in the studio.

The archive of books is scrutinised for connections, associations and relations that leads to a selection of books piled up on the desk. The photos that will be combined in the montages will be drawn from this smaller collection of books from the archive. The montages, therefore, are patchworks of books before they cut and paste individual  images into a new unified image.