My name is Sarah Merton I am an analogue collage artist. As a working-class Welsh woman, it started with cutting out images from the Argos catalogue during the nineties and getting chastised by my grandparents for the state of the carpet; it hasn’t ever really stopped.

Adopting a DIY punk perspective, I believe I can make a difference through making. A feminist paper collage maker - inspired by the Riot Grrrl movement plus Linder, Guerrilla Girls and Chila Kumari Singh Burman - I harness humble homemade media to disrupt the patriarchal positioning of women. A self-taught and actively practising artist, I frankly use old school cutting and sticking to stick it to the man!

Unfortunately, our contemporary visual landscape remains largely characterised by lads, lads, lads lookism, female objectification, sleaze and scopophilia. I am sick and tired of females playing fringe characters in their own story. Resistance and revolt permeate my physical photomontages by liberating the female form from the sexist semantics imposed via beauty standards and stereotypical gender roles. My artistic practice gleefully renegotiates the photographic terms of engagement proffered by mainstream media. As an entrenched state of inequality is eschewed through deploying scissors in the subversive dislocation of women outside of these toxic gendered social “norms.”