About Ben Stainton

I started making collages in the summer of 2013. This evolved out of a move away from poetry, which I'd been writing and publishing for about 5 years. Whereas my poetry was concerned with a wide range of subjects, my art is mainly focussed on the human form. I'm interested in the way faces and bodies can be made to collide and interact with unusual objects and things - cigarettes inside faces, cats inside sunglasses, jelly beans inside torsos; a head literally full of other bodies. 

As with some other modern collage art, I repurpose images found in material published in the 20th Century - Mad Men-era adverts, 90s fashion magazines, random stuff found in charity shops, cookery books - anything at all. 

I hope there's a narrative quality to a lot of my things, or at least an ambiguity that leaves each piece open to interpretation.  

I have sold prints and original works all over the world (the singer Elvis Costello owns one of my collages!?) and have been represented by Brickwork Gallery in London, and Dynamite Gallery in Brighton. Cover-art and other commissions to date include Casper / Van Winkles, Wetherspoons, the Portland-based hip-hop trio Ugly Tarantino, and The Missouri Review.