Jazz Grant's collage artwork is a patchwork of historical past and feelings
Jazz Grant's work is inherently nostalgic and has appealed to audiences and world-renowned clients at a time when the world was forced to retreat indoors. For creatives and everyone else, the past year was an opportunity to sift through materials and memories, be it work archives or old home videos and photos. Grant's work, imbued with the nature of collage with echoes of the past, struck a collective chord.
While their tech is largely analog and hand-made, their work has been shown in animation and films, such as in FIFA21's surprisingly intimate commercial that was released last summer. After working with her brother (who taught himself stop motion), she began engaging in animation on her own to expand her practice, including in Rhyging Sun, a collaged stop motion film that Contains material from the Jamaican film The Harder They Come.
Above: Marcus Rashford mural in Manchester's Northern Quarter for Burberry. Above: Images from the hand-cut stop-motion film Rhyging Sun for Boy.Brother.Friend. All artwork by Jazz Grant
The process of collage is similar to producing or mixing music, with each form of expression often relying on inspired sampling or mixing elements to achieve something both brain-like and emotional. Grant's work, which involves a striking interplay between contrasting palettes, patterns, and textures, embodies this.
To be constantly surrounded by images means that there is no shortage of resources. Charity shops are an important place to collect old books and magazines full of beautiful photos. Earlier series are based on a single found book. others incorporate their own honest street photography taken on their cell phones or the work of photographers, and she is currently researching the uses of old family photos. Grant is often drawn to distinctive lines and shapes, although the most important condition is that she feels connected to an image.
In terms of influences, she looks at everyone from filmmaker and artist John Akomfrah to the surrealists, including her surrealist world map which illustrates her "interpretation and idealistic rejection of Western colonial rule," she says. "I really like your unconventional stance and intent to distort reality."
Collage by Alayo Akinkugbe, founder of A Black History of Art, for Gucci x The North Face
For Grant, collage is an art form that is both accessible (“it's not elitist, you don't have to have a wealthy family, and it's fun”) and customizable. Their process includes copying or scanning at every stage so they can catalog their decisions.
Her affinity for collage seemed to have been set in motion as a child. She remembers creating costumes – a week-long ritual of painting and paper mache – for the Children's Parade in Brighton, where she grew up at the age of three. Collage wasn't the career path she had planned, however, as she specialized in menswear at the London College of Fashion and worked for respected designer Grace Wales Bonner.
“I remember showing the designer Aitor Throup at my art foundation and being so impressed with his process and the way he made clothes,” she recalls. "It wasn't really the aesthetics, but the architecture of his clothes. I was really intrigued by the way designers went from 2D to 3D, and he seemed to make it so easy. I think I chased that feeling and tried to myself to access it, but it never really clicked when I did it. I was always torn between being incredibly over the top and creative with the more practical, structured, and commercial forms of design. "
Mae Carol Jemison, the first black woman to travel into space
A collaboration with photographer Aria Shahrokhshahi
She remembers her final collection as "outrageous" outfits full of denim frills. When she looks back, she feels that it resembles a collage. “I definitely look at the clothes and fabric in pictures as I cut, so I think my initial interest and knowledge about clothes is an integral part of me and the way I work,” she says. "I'm sure I'll be making clothes in some form again and merging the two."
After a one-time collage exercise at LCF, Grant began to take the art form more seriously. She started making her own creations to give away as gifts and was later invited by fashion designer Bianca Saunders to participate in an exhibition featuring photographers such as Ronan Mckenzie and filmmaker Akinola Davies Jr.
Grant has worked with a number of leading fashion clients, including a touching collage by soccer player Marcus Rashford for a Burberry project translated into a 10 meter high mural in his hometown of Manchester.
"It's amazing that a collage was translated on the side of a building and looked good! It still drives me crazy. I'll never forget seeing it in real life for the first time," says Grant, who was just before the project had really worked with A3. "I dragged the building onto my wall and scaled it down to 10% to get a feel for the building, but it was impossible to know for sure."
Steve McQueen's mangrove was reinterpreted as a collage for The Face
Another fashion client came up with Gucci for collaboration with the North Face. As part of the project, led by A Vibe Called Tech, Grant has compiled portraits celebrating four leading figures who highlight black history through education and curation. Elsewhere, she has contributed to a zine tracing the history of the Notting Hill Carnival with the Black Curriculum (a nonprofit effort to bring more British history into UK curricula), and she was hired by The Face last year to praise Steve McQueen's Small ax anthology to channel into collages.
“When I was younger, I partied every time I came across art, film, photography, fashion, and everything else that a black person either created or was the subject of,” she says. “Of course it existed, but it was rare to encounter. It's getting less rare now and I'm still partying. "
jazzgrantstudio.com; @jazzgrantstudio