Dutch artist Michel van Collenburg turns the ransom note, one of the most primitive forms of collage, into a series of paper-on-paper works that ask hard questions about love, expectation, and the patterns that bind us.
It started with a breakup. Seven years of relationship ended, and Michel van Collenburg’s sketchbook filled up with thoughts, reflections and occasional cries of desperation. Out of that reckoning came a formal question: what is the right form for something this raw and demanding?
The ransom note turned out to be it. As a form, it is as direct as collage gets: letters cut from different sources, assembled into a message that makes demands, states a position, proclaims a point of view.
“When we are in love, how do we make ourselves heard?” van Collenburg asks. “Can we make demands to our partner without hurting the bond we share?”
The ransom note carries those questions in its very structure, a communication method associated with threat and ultimatum, repurposed here to ask what we actually require from the people we love and what happens when those requirements go unspoken.
The shift from holding to holding hostage sits at the centre of the work. Two people in a bond that tightens over time into something more constrictive: expectations become patterns, patterns become walls. “Do we hold each other, or do we hold each other hostage?” The paper-on-paper collages give that question physical form, letters demanding answers that love may not be equipped to give.
Van Collenburg’s practice more broadly is built around the idea that there is no single self: we are all fragments of upbringing, experience and imagination, assembled differently in different contexts. That fragmented, kaleidoscopic view of identity makes the ransom note form doubly apt, a message assembled from pieces that were never meant to be together, carrying meaning that none of those pieces could express alone.
Michel van Collenburg is an omnivorous visual artist, photographer and musician based between Nijmegen and Berlin, originally from Schiedam in the Netherlands. Their practice focuses on identity, gender politics and daily life, leaning heavily on collage in both image and sound. Michel uses they/them pronouns.
ARTIST LINKS
michelvancollenburg.com
@nobuka_music
Ransom Love Notes. Paper-on-paper collage.
