"discarded things"

Monica Canilao. On a completely unrelated venture I stumbled upon this sweetheart and she captured my heart. Her work reminds me of the days when I sat at my sewing machine stitching in to the wee hours, weaving colourful fabrics around wooden structures and throwing globules of paint in to the air – all for the sake of my carefully considered A-level art creations. Visually beautiful, her mixed media pieces are reminiscent of artists’ notebooks with bits and pieces all over the place, ideas and scribbles coming out of every nook and cranny and rainbows and feathers hiding around corners. Not only does she work on paper (her favourite), cardboard, glass, tatty fabrics, all manner of surfaces but she also creates installations which evoke scenes from Alice in Wonderland and old Westerns …only with a lot more wool dotted about the place. Her work reminds me of opening up a dressing-up chest. Playful. Tea-stained.

An illustrator by trade, her inspirations lie in folk tales, antwacky artefacts and other people’s abandoned kitsch junk.