Artist's Statement

You might say I formalize and arrange memories and thoughts through the discarded clothes and objects of places and people’s lives, my life, somebody’s life.

I work them into compositions that depend on formal artistic expression and meaning. The nature of the objects themselves, is central, their material, their color, texture, shape, construction and the associations, the narrative they evoke from the past, their history, and their future artistic life

The compositions are almost always based on an idea conceived and arrived at all at once and then noted and sketched on tracing paper. There follows an extended period of development, sketching, refining the whole and describing individual parts of the work, tracing, retracing, and adjusting, pretty much the way I work as an architect. The final splay and display of the objects and materials on the surfaces is the result of juxtaposing and relating the objects, their use, patterns and in perspective.

In working out the detail of a collage, I may also be seeking to uncover echoes and resonance that will help narrate an event -- "Blood Bones and Healing Devices" (a near fatal car accident), “#81” (a rainy summer evening) -- or an experience over time -- "Cumulative Impacts", "An Instrument of War, Chanel/Guernica", "Mixed Doubles". Occasionally objects seem just to appear and add themselves, ending up playing an important role in a particular work – “Safety Vest with House Fly”.

Sometimes the collages are more abstract.
-- Charles A. Platt