Dan Hillier for Dazed and Confused

An art piece for Dazed from way back in February 2007, about a Max Ernst-biting modern engraver. Last I heard he was on Neil Gaiman's thing, which is great news:

If there is a movement in art toward the dark, weird and down-right odd in art at the moment (see those Chapman boys, Sebastian Gogel and any given grub street gallery) then Dan Hillier is definitely a part of it. Hillier creates intricate, dark, surreal, graceful and iconoclastic engravings, sourced from ephemera such as Victorian medical encyclopaedias, religious imagery and found photographs. “I like using found pictures and drawing out new narratives from them by bringing previously unrelated images together. I particularly enjoy the results when they're dark and a bit weird,” he says. The results are like postcards by Beardsley from a Victorian inventor’s mansion. If the mansion was populated by circus freaks and Werner Herzog, that is. No surprise that he lists his influences as wine, Max Ernst and mushrooms, then.
He grew up in between the dreamy towers and rough-as-guts estates of Oxford, and studied art Cambridge fifteen years ago. Whilst working as a henna tattooist, he was drawn to doctoring images in his work and, as a hobby, collected fragments of Victoriana. Recently, he started combining the two and realised that new, twisted stories could be told from the most banal of materials. After sifting through car-boot sales and back-street charity chops, fitting images were found. Quite simply, he trawls though “old anatomy and science books, vintage wallpaper, old advertisements for ludicrous Victorian quackery and labour-saving devices” so we don’t have to. The images, once found are combined and doctored on Photoshop or illustrated with vintage Indian dipping ink.
The works depends on the use of forgotten images and discarded memories to re-write a gorgeously dark period of our history, full of elephant men and taxidermy, death and medicine. There’s rich vein to be tapped, and Hillier is only too happy to oblige. With a wink, he calls his work “the quiet dedications of a slightly idiotic man with a fledgling perception of the universe's mysterious charms and a joy in the pleasures of communicating a love of strangeness, darkness, nature, beauty and human people.” He pauses and laughs. “Or just lines of ink on paper and wood.”