Better Homemaking by Miranda Millward

My collage practice plays upon our memories, real and fictional, individual and collective, and the place where these memories overlap but also diverge. In life and as an artist I am fascinated by serendipity and nostalgia in terms of what we decide to preserve and in what we abandon.

My subject matter is often rooted in the feminine. The lives lived by women past and present; the roles women have occupied within society and female sexuality are reference points. There is often a surface gloss to my work that belies a more complex and nuanced narrative.

Colour is an important unifier within my practice to corral together what often appears fractured, fragmented, chaotic, disparate, and uncertain. The notion of the ‘echo’ is important to me - my work it echoic – there is a repetition of subject matter, references, and themes. I say very little about individual works and invite the viewer to make sense of what they see.

This series is titled Better Homemaking and uses images of domestic interiors from the 1950s and 60s interwoven with the colour-saturated imagery of knitting patterns. The inspiration for this new series of work was the discovery of a beautifully preserved 1950s instructive manual for the housewife titled ‘Better Homemaking’ found in a thrift store.

Miranda Millward lives and works in Oxford, UK. Since 2018 Miranda has been making hand cut analogue collage works using a variety of vintage ephemera and papers. As a creative hunter-gatherer, Miranda is fascinated by what mundane items we decide to preserve and what we abandon, as well as how reminiscence, memory and nostalgia can be both collective and individual.

Miranda has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally and has had her work included in several magazines, publications and books including Contemporary Collage Magazine, Kolaj Magazine, The Cutting Chaos, Collage Care, Collage Care: The Method and several publications by the Edinburgh Collage Collective. Miranda has several works in the prestigious Kanyer Art Collection. In 2022 Miranda was a winner of a Contemporary Collage Magazine Award. For someone with an interest in the past, it will come as no surprise that Miranda is a museum professional who works for the Oxford University Gardens, Libraries and Museums where she runs an arts programme for young people with Special Educational Needs, Learning Disabilities and Social, Emotional, and Mental Health needs across six cultural and historic venues.

Instagram @scissorspaperpaste

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