Derrick Adam's critically admired work spans various media such as painting, photography, sculpture, performance, and video, but it is through collage that his Deconstructivist approach to image-making is best illustrated.

Adams' tendency to layer and collage different materials links the artist to a lineage of pioneers ranging from Hannah Höch and Henri Matisse to Romare Bearden.

Read the artist's latest feature in the Guardian.

A famous political collage by the German artist Hannah Höch is called "Cut with the Kitchen Knife...", a metaphor for Höch’s careful slicing and dicing often used as a means of expressing political dissent. She drew together newspaper clippings, fashion magazines and photography as she firmly believed that art could be collected from the everyday clutter of modern life.

With its roots in European Dada in the early twentieth century and emerging as a reaction to the First World War, collage allowed artists to interact with existing materials to create unexpected and often shocking ensembles. The term 'collage' was coined by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso to define a new, deconstructive approach to form which, in line with the Cubist method, enabled artists to piece together a picture from dissimilar components.

(Image: Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919.)

Zahra has been a dear friend for many years. Between the times of play, what we really get into is a kind of lifelong collaboration. We’ve worked together on the Heliotrope Foundation, on the creation of a portrait and animation for Alicia Key’s Underdog album, and on the film Street Heroines which Zahra helped produce. She’s a powerful force in the world, and I kind of knew that from the second we met. Not to mention that her beauty is fierce and timeless and that’s just the truth.

This portrait is from her first pregnancy. I was drawn to this moment because it expressed the inward looking strength that gathers around a person who’s incubating a new life inside them. - Swoon