Silvia Pavarini is an Italian illustrator whose artwork typically portrays young girls with big eyes.

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Lola Dupre is a collage artist from Glasgow, Scotland, who produces highly detailed and fractured collage art. Her work is made the old-fashioned way, with paper and scissors. Eye catching and contorted works cover almost every topic: browsing her site you can see celebrity portraits, animals, fashion editorials, political caricature and reworked classical art images.

If Salvador Dali had photoshop and the access to all the awesome stock images we do today, maybe his work would look something like these photomanipulations by Paula Stirland.

Paper and the Blade is a beautiful papercut exhibition by Perth-based artist, Nia May. With more than 40 intricate designs, the show creates a two-dimensional world of foxes, teapots, skeletons, birds and little girls lost.

In her words, May makes them ‘by using a sharp knife while drinking lots of tea. And my house is often filled with confetti’. The show is on until October 5 at Sweets Workshop in Summer Hill.

Jesse Treece is a collage artist living in Seattle whose work screams simple yet complex, with interpretations of both the mundane and whimsical facets of life.

He’s somehow managed to mix both the regular and absurd, beautiful and disturbing, and put them into images that you could get lost in for hours. He is currently involved in a collaborative collage book project that is traveling from mailbox to mailbox around the globe.

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Plastic Robot is a diverse artist working with photography, painting, drawing and collage. Commonly found throughout his artworks are highly personal subjects. He generously allows us into his world of love and defeat, beauty and misconduct. His artworks are directly inspired by, and connected to, his personal life and he creates with clarity and compassion. And never without bite.

Beth Hoeckel, a Baltimore-based artist, has created some wildly experimental and wonderfully psychedelic works over her career. Her figures tend either directly challenge or ignore the viewer, referencing themes of identity and perception. Bright and bold, these are insistent images. Do they remind anyone else of Run, Lola, Run?

Check out the warm art from 20 year-old Microbiology student, Jerica, who captures dreamy landscapes from all over the world, draws textbook influenced pieces, and creates Valerian Marguery-inspired collage from 90s kids Encyclopedias.

Ina Jang’s photography is extraordinarily unique. Her compositions playfully fool with depth, her images gently and humorously introducing new meanings to familiar objects. Ina’s photos, carefully planned and executed, often involve cutting, gluing and pasting mundane objects, such as paper and cotton balls, and layering them with figures in extremely minimal spaces.

This playfulness softens the somewhat stark quality of her compositions and palette, and invites the viewer to enjoy and explore as they might have as a child the meanings of the world around them. She currently has a solo exhibition up at the White Rabbit in New York City.

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Ann Marshall creates her captivating portraits using a unique blend of traditional techniques and paper collage. She is currently exhibiting at the New Masters show at Subliminal Projects in Los Angeles, CA.

Artist Julia Tepasse, aka Großstadtheidi, lives in Heimathafen, Hamburg, where she studies fine arts at the University of Lueneburg, with a particular interest in minimal, abstract and post-modern art.

Rui Ribeiro is an illustrator with a graphics background, so his technical skill and attention to design can be seen in his work. His works have messages reflecting today’s society, as well as human details, like hair, to infuse his style with highly detailed finishing.

The work of illustrator Kotryna Zukauskaite is highly inspired by ornamental decor, but hides a deeper concept behind it.

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Latvian artist, Liga Kitchen, lives in London where she creates detailed illustrative tales, using collage and graphics to tell her story.

Sydney and London-based artists Kirsten Fredericks and Sarah Howell explore the holiest of power couples in their first joint exhibition: Adam and Eve. The artists invite viewers to sample the fruits in their Garden of Eden, with works that explore the masculine and feminine, the playfulness of sex, kitschy animalia and a uniquely perverse, tongue-in-cheek take on all of the above. At Sydney’s Blank_space Gallery between October 9 and 15.

Eric Yahnker’s collages and phot-realistic drawings done from collages are a terrifying, hallucinogenic mashup of pop images.

Les Savy Fav drummer Harrison Haynes also makes some pretty incredible art that plays with the assumptions and materiality of photographic processes and images, using collage, painting, and installation elements.

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The psychedelic and surreal mixed-media drawings and collages by Jason Matthew Vivona are growing on my brain like a benign alien tumor.

Artist C.D. Richardson uses some pretty amazing collage techniques to create terrifying, cryptozoological illustrations of monsters and freaks out of old medical and scientific photographs.

Sugar by name, Sugar by … well, so it goes. And so she goes, the Australian artist nomadically, restlessly traveling the globe in search of inspiration, persperation and a different menu each night of the week. Such is the life. We interviewed Sugar recently: You’re in Mexico? I never quite know where you’ll be next. What brings you there? ‘I know! Since we have started communicating in 2006, I have lived in Melbourne, Zurich, Barcelona, London, Buenos Aires and now in Mexico. It is crazy but I love it’.
Why Mexico?
‘Well, I think I realized, travelling so much, that it is my spirit home. It is the most beautiful place on earth to me. Don’t get me wrong. I will never stop travelling. There is just too much to see. Maybe even outer-space. Who knows. But my heart is here I know that much. People can be inextricably drawn to certain places and I think it is really important to listen to that. To listen to that thing within you that comes alive.

Now this place could be the puddles you played in at the end of your street, your favourite roller-rink or the town of “Truth or Consequences”. (This really is a town in New Mexico, I have been there) Ha. My point is that you need to follow that thing that takes you there. Mexico. Hell. It is gorgeous.

There is colour everywhere and music and ribbons and fire-crackers and the kinds of people’s faces that make you cry because you can see the wind and the desert and the earth in them. I love the hand-painted sign-age, the colonial architecture, the retablos, the day of the dead, the food, the language, the textiles and patterns, the landscape, the light on the cobble-stones, the every-day-ness. I love how shitty the drivers are and that some cars are held together by plastic bands. I want to melt into every atom of it all.

Yesterday I was swimming in a lagoon surrounded by hummingbirds and I had to cry-swim because it was so beautiful.

I suppose on a practical level also, I just signed with Anna Goodson Management and something made me want to be closer to North America.

I think Mexico is a good centre for me to be able to travel to and from yet keep my heart warm.

How fluent is your creative process? Is it bursts of energy and inspiration or are you a walking, talking well of ideas?
‘I think I am pretty manic. I take a lot of time looking, observing, retreating, hiding and scheming. Being very reclusive, actually. Then someone or something clicks that switch, I am “on” and there is no turning “off”. Some of my closest friends find this pretty hilarious. One once said, “You are the most extroverted introvert I have ever known”. I think that is very true.

To be fair, though, I work every day and consistently create without really needing a break. I feel most alive when I am making things or writing or burdening my friends with my alien soliloquies. So I guess I am fluent with spikes and valleys, if that makes sense’.

How personal is your art/design work: do you inject a little piece of Sugar into every creation or is a job, a job, a job …?
‘Everything I do is personal and full of love or I would not do it. I chose very carefully, after years of horrible menial work, to find a way of living where I would always be present at the centre of what I was doing in a meaningful way. It is so much more fun to care about what you do.

I made the Lint Museum intimate because I wanted to celebrate the intimate. I did not want to be hired by anyone who was not interested in that or the ephemeral or the eclectic. I wanted to work with people who are as excited as I am about the little things in life.

I also think the Lint Museum is a pretty honest way of showing people what they are going to get if we work together. It is much more than a portfolio.

Are your costumes a fun way to lose yourself in fantasy or an even more fun way of losing yourself in reality?
‘I don’t think it is either really. I think costumes are a way to express yourself or make fun of yourself but I don’t think you get lost. In fact, I think you reveal more about who you are through costumes.

Take halloween, for example, aren’t you always intrigued by what people choose for themselves?

There is a big difference between a girl who dresses up as a chicken or a gnome and a girl who choses to be a nun or a witch or a werewolf or a stripper.

(I love werewolves by the way)

Anyhow. I think that we are all dressed in costumes all the time anyway. Conservative business man, emo, priest, cowboy, sex-kitten, hippy, high-roller or average joe.

There is really no time when we are not in costume. Sometimes they are just a little more elaborate. Like the one I dressed in for you today. (see illustration)

Thank you Zolton. You are a star. I am a huge fan of lost at e minor and have been amazed by how prolific you are and how the site has grown.

Champagne! For all my friends!’