Harsh Arya Hand-cut collage — 2020–2021

Series · Eight works on the cutting mat

A Personal Piece of Earth

I kept cutting whatever caught my attention with an X‑Acto knife, and arranging it by hand on a green cutting mat. There was no final destination in mind.

Collage: a male portrait split with a silver classical statue head, a teal eye, red city skylines, snowy mountains and grazing yaks — Fig. 01 — Untitled Magazine, paper, adhesive · finished digitally

01 / Learning by hand

I was learning about design then. This was how the early designers worked — so I worked the way they did. Researching, studying a lot of artists and illustrators, and, I’m sure, stealing like an artist from one or two of them. What I loved was the play of scale, and the surreal that came out of it.

Collage: a baker with a cake, a chef taking a phone selfie, an eye overlaid with floating planets, a mushroom cloud, a magnifying glass, a daisy and a woman in florals — Fig. 02 — Untitled Magazine, paper, adhesive · finished digitally

02 / A surreal time

These were the days of the pandemic — as surreal as any moment I’ve lived. And if that could somehow make sense, then so could these: images torn from their context and rearranged, until they begin to hold an emotion of their own.

Dense colourful collage: a figure in a PPE suit, an elephant on an orange sun, masked schoolchildren, an Indian wedding, a TATA truck, a cruise ship and the Empire State Building — Fig. 03 — Untitled Magazine, paper, adhesive · finished digitally

The Postcards arrangement in progress on the green cutting mat — Fig. 04 — The Postcards Hover · tap to disintegrate → the cutting mat

Fig. 04 — The Postcards Hover · tap to disintegrate → the cutting mat

From the mat

Documentation · iPhone · studio

There was no final destination in mind. I just kept cutting — a face here, a building there, an elephant, a bus, a flower — laying the pieces down, lifting them, moving them, until the arrangement felt true. Then I’d photograph it and take it into Photoshop to finish.

The same collage in progress, laid out on a green self-healing cutting mat with a steel ruler alongside — Fig. 05 — the plate dissolves to the mat Hover · tap → back to loose paper

Fig. 05 — the plate dissolves to the mat Hover · tap → back to loose paper

The full sheets — uncropped

The orange-beanie collage in progress on the green cutting mat with a steel ruler — Fig. 05 — on the mat

An arrangement in progress on the cutting mat: a white-suited figure, a grey vintage car badged GQ India, a tufted sofa, a banana and assorted cut-out portraits — Another sitting — tried and re-tried

The Postcards collage laid out on the green cutting mat, a steel ruler running across the top edge — Fig. 04 — mid-assembly

The raw material

Magazines · before the knife

Every figure began as someone else’s photograph — a glossy ad, a travel feature, a cover. I cut them out of their old lives and gave them new ones. A few of the originals:

Samsung — Galaxy Z Flip

became the face at the centre of Fig. 07

GQ India full-page house advertisement: a man examining the camera through a large magnifying glass, on a red background

THE MAN magazine, December 2018 cover: an older tailor adjusting the tie of a younger man, headline World's Most Popular Tailors

Lonely Planet magazine, July 2018, the Postcards reader section: a footbridge in Inverness and a yak beside Lake Nam in Tibet

A sibling composition: the orange-beanie portrait with green and blue eyes, four suited men emerging from the head, a typewriter, flowers and Coach and Michael Kors bags, over rainbow paper shapes — Fig. 06 — Untitled (variant) The same head, re-arranged

        Fig. 07 — Untitled
        Magazine, paper, adhesive · finished digitally
      

Before any of this

And I remember now: this wasn’t the first time. My first‑grade science books met a similar fate.

There’s a legend that in some cultures the camera was thought to steal a sliver of the soul. As a child I believed something close to it — that if I tore out the picture of the Earth, the one with the diagram of the crust, I would somehow be holding my own personal piece of Earth.

(And in case you’re wondering which five‑year‑old is busy dismantling diagrams of the planet — I was an ICSE kid, hopelessly fascinated by science and space.)

Collage of city streets: a smiling man in an orange jacket striding over a skyline, an older man gesturing, Gucci and Fish & Chips and Lawson storefronts, yellow taxis — Fig. 08 — Untitled Magazine, paper, adhesive · finished digitally