Paper After All is a collaborative touring exhibition devised by Royal Cambrian Academy in Conwy, LLE in Cardiff, and PAPER and Saul Hay Gallery in Manchester. The exhibition brings together a group of artists associated with each organisation for a dialogue around paper. Each artist has been asked to respond to the idea of assemblage: art that is made by assembling disparate elements – often everyday objects – scavenged by the artist or bought specially in order to create a new body of work for the exhibition.

Assemblage is a process that can be dated back to the Renaissance through the aristocratic practice of curating cabinets of curiosity brimming with oddities as evidence of intellect and cultural distinction. Over time, these practices filtered down to the commonplace use of the mantelpiece as a location of prized possessions. Objects of personal significance and status have appeared in art throughout history, from Dutch memento mori still lives evidencing wealth and status with the caveat of impermanence to Cornell’s Shadow Boxes that contain his voracious wanderlust. In the early part of the 20th Century, artists incorporated items and objects form popular culture into their actual work: Braque and Picasso used collage in their Cubist works, Dadaists Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann created political satire from manipulated newspaper cuttings, and Kurt Schwitters took this to a whole new level with his immersive Merz, a psychological collage of found fragments.

In the post-war years, artists incorporated pop culture images and objects into their world in order to question ideas of representation and reality in media saturated world. In developing an objectivist realism, Pop art took assemblage to new extremes of scale and complexity. Assemblage is a continual presence in our contemporary everyday lives. Social media provides an outlet to share assemblages of curated personal content, communicating taste and cultural capital to our followers. We appropriate continually in order to create our own unique identities. We are cultural magpies picking over and collecting the ephemera of our times in order to find connection and community.

Paper After All invites around 40 artists to create assemblages that scour the present day. The exhibition features collage, sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, video/animation, and Multi-media, as each artist stretches the concept in order to bring assemblage into their diverse practices.