About

Collage as salvage, witness, and pressure release.

Torn Frames is a living archive of one-of-one collage works built from damaged printed matter. Each piece is treated as both image and object: something to be looked at closely, held in memory, and kept visible even after it leaves the studio.

The human

Nathan Davis is an artist and designer based in Georgia.

Through Torn Frames, he creates one-of-a-kind collage works built primarily from comics and manga - printed pages, panels, and fragments reassembled into new compositions. Each piece fractures narrative and remixes its parts, disrupting sequence until a new image holds.

Each work is assembled by hand from printed fragments and treated as both artifact and record, regardless of the surface it lives on.

The process is intuitive but deliberate. Pieces are cut, shifted, and layered until something locks - a moment where the composition stops feeling constructed and starts feeling inevitable.

Nathan lives and works with his family. The work follows that same cadence: start, interrupt, return.

Artist statement

The work begins with source material that already carries history: comics, photocopies, notes, packaging, and worn paper that has been handled, folded, marked up, or left behind. I cut into those fragments to keep their charge intact while shifting their meaning. The finished collage is not a clean replacement for the source. It is a pressure field made from memory, damage, and reassembly.

Process

Most pieces begin with accumulation rather than a sketch. I gather a pile, test relationships, tear and redraw, then keep adjusting until the surface starts to hold tension on its own. I am not trying to polish the material into something neutral. I want the seams, pressure, and scars to remain visible so the object still remembers what it came from.

Commissions begin the same way the archive does: with material that matters. They start at $50. If you have source pages, a memory, a theme, or a scale in mind, we can shape that into a one-off collage using the same salvage-first approach as the studio work.

Discuss a commission