Melinda Tidwell

Creating masterful collages from found books, Melinda Tidwell’s compositions, which recall the Merz Pictures Collages of Kurt Schwitters, focus on the juxtaposition and coherence of color, pattern, placement and size. The abstraction of typographic information into bits of nonsense tease the viewer into the wider field of free association and imagination.

Melinda’s work begins with the formal aspects of design and the balance of visual elements in composition. The components of language from her medium of found books: typography, words, sentences, diagrams, pictures that bring individual meaning to each piece. Cut away from their original context, they operate as texture and shape, and also as a kind of code, or pieces of memory. The abstraction of this information into bits of non-sense, hopes to tease the viewer into that wilder land of free association and one’s own imagination.