Ray Monde
Ray Monde, born 1971, grew up in Burrell Creek, a dairying region on the mid-north coast of New South Wales. Completing a Bachelor of Arts at Charles Sturt University in 1994, he worked in advertising as a copywriter in London, New York and Sydney. Following studies at the National Arts School in 2012, he moved to Braidwood on the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales to work as an artist full-time. Monde works primarily in mixed media, collage and synthetic polymer paint, to create heavily textured works. There’s a sense of destruction and rebirth in his works as he destroys old advertisements to create new artworks. 'As a kid I used to plaster my bedroom with pictures from magazines using Perkins Paste. Those early days with paper and glue sparked a deep connection with the tactile nature of paper – moving me into a career in advertising and direct marketing where I would obsess over paper samples. My art practice continues to be paper-based. While early works were carefully cut images from magazines, I moved to creating colour palettes of torn colours from glossy magazines. This forces me to economise in colour and creates serendipitous moments when part of a printed image becomes something else entirely. My current works explore the isolation of suburban life, where lives are compartmentalised and played out on the stage of our backyards. There is also an element of destruction and rebirth in my work – destroying the glossy magazines of my former advertising life to create something entirely new'.