COLLAGE ART: CATHY WARD’S “PAGAN LOVE GODS”

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Cathy Ward, brutjournal’s London-based artist-correspondent, lived and worked in New York, where she soaked up the city’s sometimes exuberant, sometimes sinister atmosphere. The AIDS crisis was still unfolding. She produced related series of collage works filled with sexual energy and urban angst. Here, we examine these strange, potent images.

PRODUCED IN NEW YORK DURING THE HEIGHT OF THE AIDS CRISIS, A GROUP OF STRANGE IMAGES MIXED THE EROTIC AND THE UNREAL

by Edward M. Gómez

The artist Cathy Ward has long been interested in and inspired by a wide range of subjects and passions, from mythology and forgotten cultural histories to punk rock, wagon trains, harpsichord music, Irish folk songs, anything Gothic, cats, mediumistic art, and various aspects of the occult.

As brutjournal's London-based artist-correspondent, she has brought us numerous, fascinating reports from both the overlooked creative fringes and the front lines of the experimental, the far-out, the unexpected, and the hard-to-classify new.

Cathy Ward, “Peach,” 1990, acrylic and cut paper on canvas, 10 x 12 inches. Photo courtesy of the artist

Although Ward may be best known for the abstract paintings she has produced in recent years, whose rhythmic compositions seem to refer to the human body, skin, and cascades of voluminous, shimmering hair, while also bringing to mind the unknowable depths and forces of black holes way out in outer space, for many years, she has also made collage works or integrated collage elements into her various creations.