glynn b. cartledge

COLLAGING

An artist who spent over twenty-five years as a criminal lawyer, Glynn Cartledge’s work examines the justice system. Her work includes collage-making of prison and jail cells.

To maintain a practice of intense study and craft while also pushing that practice into uncomfortable spaces, embracing creativity and allowing playfulness to enter the work is one of the functions of collaging jail cells. They are serious representations of emotive images of life in a 6’ by 8’ room with a low profile mattress and a sink on top of a toilet.

In making collages, Glynn is expressing fictions that society produces about those incarcerated, whose emotional utterances are normally ignored. Collaging these jail cells becomes a meditative process of cutting, pasting, and assembling to form an intention and speak about the inequities. It is also a codified language that allows her to pull from a variety of relatable sources and condense them into a single image about the imprisoned. This cathartic violence applied to the materials allows the broken-up pieces to be restructured while remaining fractured, as the people are. Glynn’s hope is that elements of poetic abstraction mixed with critically charged content allows the one-off cell collages to live as hybrid portraits of otherness, isolation, diversity, and systematic injustice.

Many of the collages were exhibited at Far Beyond the Walls in 2024 at the Nevada State Prison (decommissioned). https://www.melhopgallery.com/exhibitions-1/far-beyond-the-walls.

DIMENSIONS AND PRICING

I have had the collages either professionally framed or left them unframed. All framed collages are $425. Unframed are $200. Price does not include shipping.

The collages measure 8 ½” x 11 ½.” They are floated. The frame measures 17 ½” x 20.” The unframed collages measure 8 ½” x 11.” A white watercolor paper borders each collage and the measurement is therefore 11” x 15.”