Adi Dick

First few basic questions, who are you, what are you doing, where are you coming from?

I’m Adi Dick, I’m from Wellington, New Zealand, but moved to Norway 11 years ago where I now live with my Norwegian wife and two kids. I work as a designer at FINN.no, Norway’s biggest online marketplace. There, I lead the design system team and create a multi-brand design system for all of our marketplaces in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark.

I got a Bachelor of Design degree in 2000, in Wellington, then spent a number of years after university working as a musician, working in a record store to pay the bills, and creating a lot of music-related art and design on the side.
I moved to London in 2007 where I started my full-time designer career.

Why collages? How did you start to do them?

Collage has always been a part of my visual vocabulary. From skateboarding as a teen to learning design in the 90’s grunge aesthetic era, the D.I.Y. cut ‘n’ paste aesthetic has always been a natural approach for me. I’m heavily influenced by hip hop culture where sampling is a way of referencing things of the past, while pushing ideas into the future. So collage for me is my way of paying homage to my influences by reimagining everything I’ve ever been moved by, through my own lens.
I started actively focusing on working with collage and mixed-media art this year after my father passed away in April. His passing made me realize that I should be spending more time with the people I love, and doing the things that satisfy me most creatively. So, after working with design systems all day long, following rules and best practices, collage is a form of creative freedom, where there are no rules, and every piece I start opens up a whole new world of unexpected possibilities. I’m also a person who has too many hobbies, so I’ve actively chosen to focus on collage, for now, so I can put in my 10,000 hours, and see what happens. My goal has been to create and post a new piece every day, to turn the process into a habit, and I’ve been doing that now for nearly 6 months.

Do you work on multiple pieces at the same time or simply focus on one?

My artistic process varies depending on my mood or energy on any given day. Some days I’ll work on creating one piece, other days I’ll prep a bunch of pieces or cardboard with gesso, and maybe some acrylic paint textures, ready to use. I’m constantly collecting source material, cutting out things, and gathering them in my scraps box, so I always have things ready to cut and paste. I treat it a bit like beat-making, where I like to gather my samples and have a bunch of things I can just grab and use whenever creativity strikes. I don’t like to think too much about what I’m going to create beforehand, because, like music, it’s the improvising part of it that excites me and produces the most unexpected results. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t, but the great thing about collage is, that if it’s bad, you can always rip layers off, paint on top of it, or collage right over it, and then stop when you’re satisfied, or are just ready to move on to the next one.

In your artworks, what are the most important things/elements to yourself?

The most important elements in my work would be composition and the interplay of the materials used. To me, each piece is like a snippet of a dream I’ve had or a snapshot of what the things I love would look like if they were squished together. I’m very nostalgic, so I’m forever chasing the feeling I got when I was first moved by some of my favorite designers, painters, graffiti artists, or creators. I’m trying to boil down that feeling to its essence and explore what that means in terms of my own artistic identity.

You’re also a musician, does being a musician or the music show somehow in your works?

My art is hugely influenced by over a decade of working in record stores, staring at album covers for 8 hours a day, and surrounding myself with music. I discovered some of my favorite artists and designers in the liner notes of my favorite albums, and I will always have a love affair with physical music formats. I use a lot of musical visual references in my collage work, from record label logos to old jazz magazine pages, to pictures of musicians. A lot of my compositional skills come from years of dissecting album covers, hip-hop and dance music flyers, and other music-related designs. I’ll often have hidden references in my work that I’ll hint at with the music I use when I share work on Instagram. To me, music and art are intertwined, and I’ll always imagine what the soundtrack would be when I look at something visual.

“It’s all about creating visual harmony, or tension, and telling a story visually, keeping the elements balanced in a similar way to music. “

If you compare writing music and creating collage – Are there any similarities in the creative process? And how about, are there differing parts?

To me making music and creating collage have many similarities. With songwriting, it’s all about telling a story, and figuring out what the dynamics of the arrangement should be, to make the story interesting. How can I build the song to a climax? What instruments should I add, and when? How do I make sure the arrangement gives the instruments room to breathe. With collage, it’s all about creating visual harmony, or tension, and telling a story visually, keeping the elements balanced in a similar way to music. As a musician, studying different types of music and learning how to play different styles builds up your musical vocabulary so that you can draw on these things when needed. Artists do the same by exploring different art and design techniques and learning by copying other artists. So when it comes to music and art, I know that I have a broad set of knowledge, experience, and skills that allow me to improvise freely and that the output will be a curation of sorts of the best ideas and techniques I’ve learned along the way.

What do you look for when you go through the materials? What catches your attention?

When digging for collage samples, I like to look for different things that I think will work well together. I’ll usually have a bunch of typographic things that I find interesting, old type specimens, retro ornamental type, logotypes, or typography I can crop into abstract forms. Colourful paper, colour halftones, transparent paper. Worn vintage magazines, mat paper, technical drawings, and instruction manuals. Vintage music-related magazines, catalogs, and old ads for vintage or obsolete musical equipment. Old sketchbook pages with my illustrations or ideas that I can paint and paste over or cut up and use. Vintage letraset, stencil patterns, and other old and interesting print and design-related ephemera. Things that catch my attention are often things that trigger nostalgia, like childhood toys or gadgets, old advertisements, or things that have some kind of meaning for me. When I use those kinds of things it feels like I’m injecting a part of me into the piece.

What are your favorite source materials, or do you like the challenge of working with something new?

I do have a few favourite sources materials and colour combinations, but I’m always trying to avoid sticking to any regular styles, in the hope that I’ll discover something new and interesting. I do struggle though when I don’t have nice textured or interesting materials, or if things are too glossy and bright. There’s part of me that thinks that old and dirty is better or more authentic, but I think that is just my personal style preference.

What keeps you collaging? What excites you about it?

Collage is a relief from the everyday stuff. It’s true creative freedom, and also a chance for me to zone out and do something that gives me energy. I’m excited about the possibilities of mixed media art and think that the sky is the limit when it comes to the possibilities within the format.
I’m also just determined to keep pushing my own boundaries but I have set very low expectations for myself in order to keep it fun and light and to not take it too seriously.