About Opening Scenes

Opening Scenes is a collection of prints by James Voce, drawn from literature and film.

Each work begins with a source — a novel, a line, a scene — and is reworked into a visual composition. Some pieces are built directly from text, compressing or rearranging the original words into new forms. Others take a more conceptual approach, translating ideas, structures, or tensions into image.

The focus is not illustration as depiction, but reduction — where narrative becomes pattern, field, or symbol.

These works sit alongside a broader practice centred on hand-cut papercuts, created from the pages of books. In those pieces, the original text remains physically present — cut, stitched, and held within the work itself.

That body of work is presented through The Juicing Room and includes The Novel Print Archive — an ongoing series of prints derived directly from those papercuts — where each work is part of a larger, evolving body.

Opening Scenes runs parallel to that practice. The prints are produced as a more accessible format, while remaining grounded in the same underlying concerns: how text can be restructured, and how meaning shifts through form.

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James Voce