During my Digital Media studies at Deakin University, I began creating digital collages using Public Domain illustrations from the British Library. Through exploration of these archives, I collected imagery relating to my Māori tīpuna (ancestors), creating works that reclaimed these historically ‘stolen’ taonga (treasures). My early experiments in the technique focused on combining illustrations with royalty-free watercolour backgrounds. I then began exploring the technique more broadly, combining layers of illustrative elements with royalty-free photos, fonts and graphic design elements. On average, each finished artwork would combine 10-15 original illustrative elements together digitally in Photoshop to form the finished collage.

These digital collages gradually evolved to explore a greater diversity of themes.

The work below – ‘Finis’ [2017] – was a culmination of these experiments, exploring concepts of life, death, and rebirth.
This piece was 100+ layers of illustrations.

This concept is also shown in the piece ‘Coldness and Cruelty’ [2017] below:

This piece began to incorporate historical illustrations with royalty-free photos, as well as scans of my own source images.
In the above image, I’ve incorporated the photo of a man from a ‘Missing’ poster from my time living in Bogotá, Colombia.

The final work in this series was completed as a cover for Melbourne band Party On My Darling’s debut EP ‘How Not To Love‘.
It combined 250+ layers of royalty-free and Public Domain images and illustrations.

See my Instagram with all of my Kea Meamea work here.