Paul Butler

Paul Butler is a post- disciplinary artist whose practise includes hosting the collage party, a touring experimental studio established 1997, and directing the operations of The Other Gallery. He has exhibited at The Museum of Contemporary Art.

Paul Butler created a series of work called 'What's Within'. I think he created this series by taking street photography and cutting out areas of the photographs, mainly the person in the subject. He then uses similar photographs that he has taken of the same location and layers it behind the cut out area. I really like the way you can make out that there is a figure there but cannot see it clearly. It gives a sense of being there but viewing whats inside through symbolism and meaning rather than whats on the outside. In some of his works he has included several cut outs of figures, whether they are the same person or different people it makes you think why are they included within the same image, maybe they are linked in some way by the scene. 
His work inspired me to experiment with combination printing. Combination printing is a technique of combining two or more photographs. I kept mine quite simple by cutting out rectangles and exposing an image into the different rectangles, whereas Paul Butler cuts out silhouettes of people and puts the same scene in the silhouette. 
I could have linked my work closer to Paul Butlers by cutting out silhouettes of people in the photograph of a building so that within the building image there would be a silhouette of a person or took a picture of a landscape and combination printing a building within it.