Having spent much of the last decade working with and around books and booksellers, I’ve occasionally found myself in the position to buy works in a genre that I have always loved, but that would normally fall into the realm of the financially prohibitive. These works—illustrated books of the 19th, 18th, and 17th century—were often available to me only because their soiled engravings, detached covers, missing sections, worm-eaten interiors, or water-stained pages had removed them from the grip of the dealers and collectors who normally sought them out.

When I began to cut them into pieces and recombine them, my chief inspiration was probably the work of Max Ernst, but as I continued, I think I was largely converted by the iconography of the prints themselves, and particularly the genre of emblem books, whose contents often seemed to me to be stranger and more surreal than even 20th century surrealism, pointing as they do to wholly other ways of conceptualizing and experiencing the world.

One early and enduring influence was found in the work of scholars like Frances Yates, Lina Bolzoni, and Mary Carruthers, and in the systems of thought they describe,  iconographically expressed in such works as  the engravings of Petrus Von Rosenheim’s “Ars Memorandi.” I think of my collages as recalling these sorts of mnemonic prints, though in my case, rather than refer back to some thought or text of the past, they try to draw out memories which are wholly imaginary.

-Ben Swift