In recent years my work has been inspired by ideas from contemporary physics. To illustrate the actual make-up of matter I have employed the hard edges of collage. Integrating intact images with mosaic-like passages of small shards of photographs has created a sense of surfaces stripped away revealing a magnified view of what exists below.
Merging this technique with the photographic deconstructing and reassembling of specific places, I have combined interwoven perspectives with glimpses of the infinitesimal, creating compositions that hint at invisible, underlying structures and imperceptible extra dimensions. Familiar scenes have been re-imagined: suggesting the intrusion of alternate worlds and jumps through space and time.

In these handmade photo-collages everyday, familiar images are transformed into compositions that hint at invisible, underlying structures.

Individual photographs have been fractured and reassembled to symbolize the building blocks of matter. Integrating these photographic shards with intact images has created recognizable but dynamically altered scenes.

It is as if surfaces have been stripped away to expose what is underneath: configurations suggestive of fundamental molecular structures or the frenetic motion at the subatomic level.

„David Hockney’s claims about photography and painting effectively illustrate not only Dunlevie’s use of paint but also her unique representations of place and space, which might be interpreted as an intriguing new variant of analytic cubism….." Don Snyder, "Not at First Glance", Gallery TPW Panscopic Journal, www.photobasedart.ca"

Inspired by a space, I photograph it segment by segment from various vantage points. Next, I arrange and rearrange the images until a new coherence emerges. The result - a photographic equivalent of a Cubist collage - is uneven, with visual jumps occurring wherever the edges of two photos meet. Finally, I paint, blurring the borders between photos and smoothing the abrupt shifts in perspective.

This knitting together of disjunctive parts seems to coax the space into giving up its secrets. It is as if a plateau’s sunken river bed were to unfold and rise up into the viewer’s line of sight, or as if a "mirror-on-a-stick" spy-toy allowed a look straight ahead to reveal details from outside the viewer’s visual scan.

 The interweaving of perspectives creates a space with twists and ripples, revealing unexpected nooks and crannies and peeks around corners. The initial photo-collage is transformed, through the act of painting, into a pictorial space where weird transitions and subtle spatial anomalies emerge. The depiction of this new space is not just a record of what we see while moving in space over time, but includes elements that have appeared as if from beyond the customary four dimensions. Amidst the reorganization of the various perspectives, one catches sight of details not visible in the original space: details suggestive of the extra dimensions posited in contemporary theoretical physics.

This new pictorial space is not just a composite of things we see as we move through space and time. It also offers glimpses of what may actually exist around us that we do not see."

Kathryn Dunlevie 2006