My affair with shopping tags goes on for years. It sprang from the love of shopping itself, of course. I would buy an item of clothing, and then would stare at its tag, rubbing it with my fingers, unable to through it into the dustbin. And so collecting began, without even thinking about what to do with all these treasures. There came a day when one of them was in my hands while journaling and so I glued it on. Imagine taking a "Homemade" tag off a jar of jam and pasting it into a journal page about your baby? Kids are "homemade" after all. Eventually I acquired many tags through personal shopping and from other people. Here is one of my boxes, full of them, sorted by colour, waiting to be incorporated into my art. Almost every journal page of mine has at least one of them glued in. I usually choose it for my artwork not only by colour, but by message, as they often have intricate logos and names with inspiring meaning: Rage, Instinct, Tango, Girls Rule, Dream Baby, Poetry, Free People, Phenomena, to name but a few. And it’s not only colour and message that is inspiring about shopping tags, it’s also texture – amazing variety of tactile qualities: fabric, paper, textured cardboard, plastic and leather tags. I would often take a shopping tag before even starting an art page, and its name would inspire the whole theme of my artwork. This journal entry is an example of background made of tags, black ones on the left, white ones on the right, whole two pages filled with them. They were glued, overlapping each other. Then I drew white and black grids in acrylics, glued photos and outlined them with red oil pastel. One square was overpainted in white acrylic and words written on it with black pen.
