Down the rabbit hole; that’s where Tammy Brummell’s surrealistic works can take us. Her digital collages travel into another world, a new place to pause, ponder and wonder — where ancient and modern imagery collides, where curiosity abounds.
“I want to leave it open for the viewer to interpret; whatever story they want to come up with,” Brummell said. “You know, I have my own things I’m thinking about, but I don’t really try to explain things a lot. I like other people to [discover] how they feel about it or how it moves them.”
A piece titled “A Collected Crowd in the Meantime” depicts a tall staircase with a shadowed door at the top and a gaping hole at the bottom. Several figures appear throughout. Though all is open for individual storytelling, here is what Brummell sees: One figure is the all-powerful creator. Another figure is the all-knowing fortune teller. And a third figure, poised midway on the stairs, is perhaps weighing her options.
“Kind of like you can go either way,” Brummell mused.
As a child, Brummell remembers crafting cardboard dollhouses and fashioning everything from the doll furniture to the tiny artwork on the walls. Creating art has always been part of her life. However, it was her brother Kyle King who really inspired her to push her artistic limits, as he was constantly creating himself. Though he has since passed away, she admires how his art was always unconventional. He painted things like a bundle of twigs and twine, or a rug on the floor complete with detailed tassels.
Brummell studied photography and commercial art, and ongoing graphic design projects keep her busy in addition to her artwork, which she says has evolved over time. She describes her early works as more “analog”: abstract paintings, multi-media works and cut-and-paste collages. She first toyed with digital collage in a social commentary series called “Linchpin,” inspired by early 20th century Dadaism. In these works, she mixed digital collages with paint and paper.
Today, her work is primarily digital. Brummell snips and collects anything that catches her eye, with a particular affinity for vintage photos, geometric shapes, celestial themes and natural elements such as flowers, rocks, water and planets. She then scans her collections into her computer, where she enjoys adding, deleting and arranging objects against various landscapes.
She hopes her work brings viewers “a little happiness, a little imagination,” echoing her own feelings as she mixes and matches her carefully curated images. Her artwork presents an opening into new worlds, endless rabbit holes to explore. There’s just one question: Will you jump?
