Nell Sinton has long been known as a painter. She is now exhibiting collages at the Quay Gallery. She has been making these small collages for years, just as a painter does drawings or engravings. It is a second medium which presents the artist with an area of experiment which may lead to major work, but which has a life of its own. Her collages are dictated by the nature of found objects which impose themselves on the artist in a very experimental way. They are trash and scraps, relics of lives lived in the presence of them. There are no objects there that have had only a short, snappy relationship with people; these objects have been lying around for some time. When it came time to frame these collages the process continued: some of the glass has been painted and scraped, and others have been smoked and smudged; still others are sandwiches of glass revealing the wall behind. Nell Sinton’s collages have a sense of secrecy; they are surprising small closets of funk.

––Knute Stiles