ATLAS & ART

I trawl the Megahertz

Back in 2009, I began what would become my first large collage series: I trawl the Megahertz. It consists of 27 collages, all created on double pages from an old school atlas. I had bought the atlas as a child, maybe ten years old, from a secondhand shop. I remember carefully cutting out shapes from tracing paper and laying them over the maps—trying to understand the world, perhaps, or trying to rearrange it in ways that made more sense to me.

Years later, that same atlas became the ground for a very different kind of exploration. The series was born out of heartbreak—after a breakup that left me feeling small, unimportant, like a brief chapter in someone else’s story. He had left, quite literally, to race motorcycles. I stayed behind and turned to paper.

While working on the collages, I listened to one song on repeat: I trawl the Megahertz by Paddy McAloon. There was something about the voice, the melancholy, the space between the words—it mirrored how I felt at the time. Lost in static. Tuning into memory. Searching for signals from something I might have missed.

So … I rake the sky.
I listen hard.
I trawl the megahertz.
But the net isn’t fine enough,
and I miss you

a swan sailing between two continents,
a ghost inmune to radar.

Paddy McAloon

The series became a quiet, visual elegy to goodbyes and to the strange weight of not having been enough. But it was also the beginning of something else: my own visual language, stitched from fragments, layered with silence and intent.

Looking back, I think that’s when I understood what collage could be for me. Not just a way to make images—but a way to process, to navigate, to respond.