The Extended Cut:
A Conversation with Rod Edwards
1. What do you make?
I make abstract collages and non-objective paintings, especially small collage panels and acrylic paintings.
I also enjoy making analogue and digital photographs, often in black and white.
2. Which work would you want someone to encounter first?
My recent small format collage panels because, rather fantastically, they are able to bring together many of my obsessions in one place: paper, paint, built surfaces, marks and lettering.
I began making collages on old C5 business envelopes and became attached to their proportions and intimate scale, roughly A5, which is just a bit smaller than the 10 by 7 inches I’ve moved towards. These aren’t commonly available panel sizes, so I’ve started making my own partly because I love that they feel like objects in their own right to me.
3. What came before this work?
My working life began making signs and artwork for what was then the Somerset Trust for Nature Conservation. Everything was done by hand, including cut-and-paste layouts.
My adoptive mother was a professional hand-glass engraver and an amateur watercolourist and calligrapher. I too got hooked by the rhythm of calligraphy, the flow of wonderfully black and sooty ink. I took part-time courses, then studied calligraphy full-time under Ann Camp in London on a course that also included a year of bookbinding.
I was elected a Fellow of The Society of Scribes and Illuminators in 1992. My calligraphic work sold through the V&A shop in London, the Crafts Council gallery in Cardiff and a gallery in Monmouth. My wife, fellow calligrapher Angela Hickey, and I also ran a calligraphy business making hand-inscribed work for private clients, corporate clients, professional bodies and societies. I have spent nearly forty years working with line, rhythm, balance, spacing and the demands of making something precise by hand for someone else.
4. How did you arrive at abstract painting and collage?
There wasn’t one neat conversion. I began abstract painting in 2017, but discovering Nicholas Wilton and taking his courses from 2021 helped set me on a more deliberate path. Collage has become an increasingly important part of my practice since then.
For fourteen years, I kept my professional practice in something of a ‘tick-over mode’ while caring for my adoptive father. That period also included pandemic shielding and his passing at the age of 101. Making abstract work became an outlet, reclaiming time for my own creative spark.
5. What taught you to look?
Calligraphy taught me to look closely and to sense the rightness of small changes in spacing and visual weight. As a child, I was always collecting and organising groups of things.
Photography now supports my collage and painting in something like the way sketching might support the work of an objective artist. It gives me a reason to be out and about, away from my studio, and teaches me to pay attention to what is there, to see how things change over time, but also what remains unchanging through the years.
Donald Jackson has been an inspiration as an artist-calligrapher. Nicholas Wilton’s Art2Life Spark and Creative Visionary Programmes have been life-changing for me, and painters Jenny Nelson and Simon Carter have also influenced my work. Jenny Nelson was an important starting point for my collage work.
I still chuckle at the connection between what I make now and those painstaking cut-and-paste layouts at the Somerset Trust. That was before we had a Mac to do it all for us.
6. What makes the work recognisably yours?
I think it lies in the tension between my trained eye for line, rhythm, balance and space and my need now to tear, layer, obscure, scribble and disrupt.
My work draws on control without always displaying it, and I’m interested in what that makes possible when I give myself more freedom and expression.
7. What enters one of your collages?
Paper which I’ve painted or printed myself, gathered papers ranging from old business envelopes to Indian handmade sheets, and pages from old art and ship books left by my adoptive father.
I tear, layer, paint, sand and often draw into them. Writing might enter with a ruling pen or ink dripping from a pencil but things matter to me as marks now, whether or not they can be read. Existing paper can bring a memory of its previous life with it. I can preserve, alter, bury or respond to that.
8. Why does it matter that these works are physical objects?
In person, you’ll encounter the evidence of the time I’ve spent making them: worn and layered surfaces, the difference between printed and painted colour, the tension between torn and cut edges, and the quality of the marks I make by hand.
A screen can show a composition but not quite the physical presence of the thing. I want you to sense that time and judgment are present in these.
9. How has the work changed, and where is it heading?
I feel I’ve moved a long way from making language into beautiful, legible calligraphy. I now use fragments, surfaces, colours and marks that can communicate without spelling everything out.
I’m moving towards a more intuitive, spontaneous freedom in the way I build and layer my work, one in which my trained eye seems to support risk-taking rather than restraining it. I want the work to carry all of my lived experience.
10. What keeps drawing you back?
Time: how it passes, what it leaves behind and how I spend mine making work. I’m interested in whether a handmade object can make some of that time palpable.
11. What do you notice that other people tend to pass by?
I think the idea that artists notice things nobody else sees is a bit of a myth. Who doesn’t love the peeling paint of an old door, frayed or torn edges (think deckle edges!), a fragile old book page, a trace of colour left by sanding or a mark that almost reads as a letter?
What differs is the way we bring those things together.
12. How do collage, painting and photography relate to one another?
I love how built layers of collage manage to both contain and show the history of their making. How I might achieve something similarly compelling through paint, which I find almost too malleable, is the challenge I’m drawn to.
Photography sits differently because it’s initially a subtractive process for me. The world is already there and the decisions are to do with what you see, where to look, what to include and what to leave out. From there the way I process an image becomes, I think, another kind of making. That way of looking and making feeds back into my other work.
13. What tensions do you enjoy holding within a piece?
Working with precisely balanced lettering shapes, spaces and margins - that’s part of my DNA now, but the point is in trying to create pieces where those things are not in any way my main concern. It’s that old adage about mastering the rules before you can break them. Like jazz improvisation.
I love not quite knowing where it’s all going. That’s really something quite different for me. Chance and tension can enter my work through the materials, torn edges, marks and drips, but also through the way the surface, the object itself, develops and behaves as I build and layer it. Sure, I decide what to keep, obscure, balance or remove but I’m after work that has an undisciplined edge.
14. What do viewers sometimes misunderstand about the work?
When I posted one of my abstract paintings on a local community Facebook page, partly to promote a free abstract painting course, I was challenged quite forcefully about what it was and why anyone would need to ‘learn how to’ paint like this when even a child could have done it. And given my skill in calligraphy, why wouldn’t I want to make something beautiful rather than paint a ‘nothing’!
That response brought something into focus for me: it is precisely the way my experience fights back against freedom and intuition in abstract work that excites me most. My skills don’t guarantee a result anymore. That’s what fires me up.
15. What do you hope it is like to live with one of your works?
There’s always a moment when a piece feels finished and becomes a thing in its own right. I really get a kick out of that. So once it leaves my studio I hope it becomes a familiar part of someone’s life, something enduring and a pleasure to live with.
If you’d like to follow what I make next, you’ll find me on Instagram →