— Artist Process
The Layers of Memory: How Life, Time, and Experience Shape My Mixed Media Art
“Memory is never simply a record of what happened. Experiences are buried, rewritten, and rediscovered as we move through life. In my mixed media art, I explore these layers through vintage collage, graffiti, and the physical act of covering and revealing images.”
Mixed media art gives me a way to explore how memory, time, and lived experience shape the way we see the world. Our memories are never completely fixed. They are influenced by everything that happens afterward, reshaped by new experiences, and sometimes buried beneath layers of life we don’t fully understand until years later. Through vintage magazine collage, graffiti, spray paint, and layered imagery, I explore how fragments of the past can be preserved, concealed, and reinterpreted, creating new compositions that reflect the complicated relationship between who we were and who we become.
Childhood sits beneath adolescence. Early friendships become part of how we understand connection. Cultural influences shape our identities, sometimes before we have the language to recognize them. The things we experience as adults alter our understanding of the people we once were.
Some layers remain visible. Others become almost completely buried.
But buried does not necessarily mean erased.
An old interest might resurface decades later. A sound, color, photograph, or familiar image might bring an entire period of life back into focus. Something we absorbed without consciously thinking about it might influence a decision or creative impulse years later.
I think this is one of the most interesting aspects of being human: we are constantly being shaped by experiences that we cannot fully organize or explain.
This is the same principle that guides my mixed media collage process. I am interested in what happens when different periods, images, and visual histories occupy the same surface. Rather than presenting a clean, uninterrupted image, I allow fragments to interact, overlap, disappear, and return.
The result is a visual record that feels closer to the way I experience memory: incomplete, layered, unpredictable, and open to interpretation.
The materials I use are important because they already carry a history.
Vintage magazines, printed photographs, advertisements, and other pieces of printed matter were created in a particular moment. They contain the visual language of their time: the fashion, design, typography, cultural references, and images that once occupied people’s everyday lives.
By incorporating these materials into contemporary mixed media artwork, I bring fragments of the past into a new context.
An image that once served a commercial purpose can become something personal. A photograph originally intended to sell a product can take on an entirely different meaning when it is cut apart, repositioned, partially concealed, or interrupted by graffiti.
I use collage not simply to create texture or visual complexity, but to introduce another layer of meaning. The material has an identity before I touch it. My decisions change that identity without completely erasing its history.
There is a parallel here with the way we remember our own lives. We cannot return to an experience exactly as it was. We can only encounter it again through the perspective we have developed since then.
The image becomes something new, but traces of its former life remain.
My roots in graffiti play an important role in how I approach mixed media art.
Graffiti is immediate. It is physical, instinctive, and connected to identity. A mark can communicate presence without requiring a lengthy explanation. The gesture itself becomes part of the message.
Cutting, arranging, layering, painting, and reconsidering an image require a different kind of attention. One process is often spontaneous; the other involves accumulation and revision.
I am interested in what happens when those approaches meet.
Spray paint and graffiti-inspired marks can disrupt an image, establish rhythm, or create a visual interruption. They can also obscure parts of the collage, leaving only fragments visible. Sometimes the mark becomes the dominant element. At other times, it recedes into the background.
A layer that initially feels right might overpower everything beneath it. A seemingly minor mark might create the tension the composition needs. An image may become more interesting when it is partially hidden rather than fully exposed.
These decisions are part of the language of the work.
For me, graffiti is not simply a style applied to collage. It influences how I think about making marks, asserting identity, responding to a surface, and allowing instinct to shape the final result.
The combination of collage and graffiti creates a conversation between preservation and disruption. One brings fragments of history into the work; the other changes how those fragments are experienced.
Every life is built from layers of experience.
Childhood sits beneath adolescence. Early friendships become part of how we understand connection. Cultural influences shape our identities, sometimes before we have the language to recognize them. The things we experience as adults alter our understanding of the people we once were.
But buried does not necessarily mean erased.
An old interest might resurface decades later. A sound, color, photograph, or familiar image might bring an entire period of life back into focus. Something we absorbed without consciously thinking about it might influence a decision or creative impulse years later.
We are not always aware of what we carry with us.
I think this is one of the most interesting aspects of being human: we are constantly being shaped by experiences that we cannot fully organize or explain.
This is the same principle that guides my mixed media collage process. I am interested in what happens when different periods, images, and visual histories occupy the same surface. Rather than presenting a clean, uninterrupted image, I allow fragments to interact, overlap, disappear, and return.
The result is a visual record that feels closer to the way I experience memory: incomplete, layered, unpredictable, and open to interpretation.
When I begin a new piece, I do not always know exactly where it will end up.
I might start with a particular color, an image that catches my attention, or an idea about the overall mood of the composition. From there, I begin building layers using vintage collage, acrylic paint, spray paint, and markers.
An image may work beautifully at first, only to become distracting when another element is introduced. A section of collage might need to be covered with paint. A painted area might need another image to create balance or tension. Sometimes removing visual information is more important than adding something new.
This is where the process becomes interesting.
Every layer affects how the layers beneath it are understood. A mark can change the meaning of an image. A new color can shift the emotional temperature of the entire composition. An area that once felt disconnected might suddenly make sense when another element is introduced nearby.
The work develops through a combination of intention, instinct, and response.
That is an important distinction.
Layering is not automatically meaningful. Adding more material does not necessarily create more depth. If every image competes for attention, the composition loses its hierarchy. If every layer is equally visible, there is no sense of discovery.
I have to decide what deserves to remain visible, what should be partially obscured, and what needs to disappear altogether.
Those choices are as important as the act of adding material.
Even when I am working alone in the studio, I bring everything I have experienced into the process. Conversations, places, relationships, cultural references, personal challenges, and images encountered throughout the day can influence the decisions I make.
Later, a color combination might feel familiar. An image might remind me of a period in my life. A particular arrangement of shapes might trigger an association I cannot immediately explain.
I do not necessarily need to identify the source before I can work with it.
Often, the studio becomes a place where these fragments can interact without needing to be organized into a clear narrative.
This is one reason I value an intuitive approach to mixed media collage. I can respond to an image, cover it, change it, or combine it with something that seems unrelated. Through those decisions, connections begin to emerge.
The painting does not need to illustrate a specific memory to be influenced by memory.
Instead, the process allows different experiences to be digested through material, color, gesture, and composition. What begins as an uncertain feeling can gradually become a physical object.
I may not have a complete explanation for every decision, and I do not think every artwork needs one. Sometimes the meaning becomes clearer only after the work is finished and I have had time to look at it from a distance.
Photographs are saved. Objects become sentimental. Certain stories are repeated until they become part of our personal histories.
But forgetting, concealment, and revision are equally important parts of how we experience the past.
We do not remember everything. We change the way we describe our experiences. Sometimes we protect ourselves from certain memories. Sometimes we discover that a story we have told for years is more complicated than we once believed.
Covering something does not always mean rejecting it. It might mean that our attention has moved elsewhere. It might mean we are seeing it differently. Or it might mean that something new has become more important.
In my artwork, covering an image does not necessarily destroy its presence.
A fragment can remain visible at the edge of a painted area. A small section of a photograph can survive beneath a layer of spray paint. The viewer might recognize only part of the original image, leaving the rest to the imagination.
That partial visibility creates tension.
I find that more compelling than explaining everything.
Art can offer enough information to establish a connection while leaving space for the viewer to bring their own experiences into the work. One person might see nostalgia. Another might recognize a cultural reference. Someone else might respond to the color, movement, or contrast without knowing anything about the source material.
The work becomes a meeting point between the experiences I bring to it and the experiences the viewer brings to it.
That is where personal history can become something universal.
I think of my paintings as visual archives, but not archives in the traditional sense.
They do not attempt to document events in chronological order or preserve a complete record of a particular period. Instead, they hold fragments of images, gestures, colors, and associations that have been brought together through the act of making art.
Some fragments are immediately recognizable. Others become difficult to identify once they have been transformed by paint and collage.
This is especially important to my interest in the relationship between nostalgia and contemporary life. Vintage imagery can evoke a particular era, but its presence in a new composition changes how we encounter it. It becomes part of a present-day conversation rather than remaining an artifact of the past.
The same is true of personal memory.
We carry earlier versions of ourselves into the present, but we are not identical to the people we once were. Our histories remain with us, even as our understanding of them changes.
Paper, paint, and marks occupy the same physical surface, but they do not all tell the same story. Some elements compete. Some reinforce one another. Others remain unresolved.
That unresolved quality matters to me. I do not want every painting to provide a single, fixed interpretation. I want the viewer to have room to discover relationships and make connections of their own.
The artwork can hold a personal history without requiring the viewer to share it.
The longer I think about memory, the less I see it as something that belongs exclusively to the past.
Memory is active. It influences what we notice, how we respond to new experiences, and what we choose to carry forward. It shapes our identities, but it is also reshaped by them.
We are constantly interpreting our lives from wherever we happen to be standing.
That is what draws me back to the studio.
I can take an image that already has a history, introduce it into a new environment, and change its meaning through the materials and marks around it. I can preserve part of it, conceal another part, or allow a new element to redirect the entire composition.
A painting can change as I work on it. My understanding of an experience can change as I grow older. An image can carry one meaning when it first appears and another when I encounter it years later.
We do not simply accumulate memories. We continually reorganize them.
Perhaps that is why the act of making art remains so important to me. It gives me a physical way to explore experiences that do not always make sense when they remain in my head.
I can work through them without needing to resolve every question.
The final painting is not a complete record of my life. It is a record of how I have chosen to interpret parts of it at a particular moment.
Tomorrow, I might see something differently.
And that is part of the point.
My work is ultimately about what remains, what disappears, and what becomes something new. Through mixed media collage and graffiti, I explore how memory, time, and lived experience continue to shape the way we see ourselves and the world around us.
Every layer carries a trace of what came before. Every new mark changes what is possible next.
We are all works in progress, built from fragments of the past and experiences we have not yet learned how to understand.
Memory, material, and the marks we leave behind.
Discover Roche Jackson’s mixed media graffiti paintings, combining vintage collage, spray paint, and layered imagery.