Katie McCann‘s collages portray gracefully odd creatures that could easily fit in a forgotten Victorian fairy tale. They evoke Alice’s adventures in Wonderland, Jules Verne‘s sci-fi adventures and Frankenstein all at once.
The main inspiration behind Katie McCann‘s collages is summarized by a quote from Charles Altamont Doyle (who was the less known father of Arthur Conan Doyle): ‘I have known such a creature…’ In fact McCann‘s art originates from her imaginative – but no less real – response to the natural world. The artist has managed to keep alive her childhood ability to see the extraordinary in apparently ordinary objects and natural elements like butterlies’ and insects’ wings, shells, bones and leaves. As a result, her collages are populated by hybrid figures reminiscent of the fantastical creatures animating children’s literature in the Victorian era. 
Katie McCann assembles her bizarre characters with fragments cut out from vintage photos and illustrations that she finds in medical, scientific and natural history old books. She meticulously cuts tiny wings from insects, leaves and petals from plants, bones and other anatomical parts from animals and humans, so that her collection of collages resembles a personal and subjective cabinet of curiosities, as if it was a record of her imaginative entomological and anatomical discoveries. 
McCann‘s fantastical Frankenstein-like animals become specimens collected in a scientific catalogue while her elegant paper dolls stand on bird legs and have lobster claws. The artist often incorporates lace, beads and fabric into her collages. The intricately delicate effect has a tactile three-dimensional quality that makes her figures more ‘grotesque beauties’ than ‘monstrous freaks’. 
In our contemporary times ‘to be contemporary’ sounds too often like a constraining creative imperative. Luckily, Katie McCann is not afraid of defining herself as old fashioned and of reinterpreting the sense of the grotesque so typical in Victorian art. A ideally contemporary heir of those times, she mixes heterogeneous visual sources, such as nature and fashion, triggering that feeling of sudden surprise arising when the boundaries between strange and beautiful cease to exist. 
Similarly to Tim Burton‘s films and Edward Carey‘s novels, Katie McCann‘s art retains a timeless poetic quality that comes out of its being dark and hunting and for that same mysterious reason delicate and tender. 
To discover more of her collages, visit Katie McCann‘s website Beetle Blossom and check her portfolio on Flickr.
Thanks to Katie McCann for the use of the images.
via e MORFES
Observatory Mansions 
