The works within this series by Tia Halliday, to be featured within Skew Gallery's Merge 2 exhibition, are framed as small worlds for individual consideration.

Each work is made with watercolour on paper and collaged together to form small elaborate figurative scenes and unusual composite portraits.   The collage scenes illustrate a female character's complicated relationship to technology and everyday objects.   The works range from the depiction of a woman caught in an odd physical entanglement with her patio furniture, or a character's use of black construction paper taped to her body as a visual cropping device to improve her on-line sex life.   Guided by a sense of humour and subtle irony, each illustrated scene attempts to visually portray a character's simultaneous desire for intimacy and urge for detachment as a condition of the contemporary experience.

Accumulation is a common visual trope used within the work, where objects appear stacked on top of or around a character, visually echoing to a sense of amass and clutter symptomatic of the consumerist lifestyle.   This common visual theme also questions our relationship to material objects, framing the sense of identity and fulfillment we project onto them.

The portraits, consistent with the scenes, utilize collage to help to illuminate the coming together of component parts. The features of each female face collaged together appear disparate, combined to form an identity that has been shaped by expectation, idealization and the often-awkward realities of the human form.

  The use of collage also amplifies the visual delicacy of the series of work, where paper characters appear to cling precariously to their environments, and portraits, like a reflection of the emotional state of the imagined character, appearing at any moment to have the potential to fall apart.