Title: Mockingbird
© Michel Keck
Most of my collage pieces begin with a clear idea—something I want to express—or with an image so compelling that it insists on becoming part of a work. Interestingly, the way I approach collage is the opposite of how I create my abstract paintings. My paintings come from pure instinct, emotion, and energy—no planning, just movement. Almost all of my collage works begin with intention.
This piece came to life because I had held onto a particular image for years, knowing I would eventually use it. I discovered it long ago while searching through vintage public-domain photographs for another artwork: a striking black-and-white picture of a mannequin woman and baby. The image always stayed with me—unsettling, intriguing.
The photograph is one of many from the nuclear bomb testing our government conducted in Nevada. I have always been drawn to these photographs.
Lately, I’ve felt pulled to create some collage works with lullabies and nursery rhymes, and one day the lullaby.. “Hush, little baby, don’t say a word” popped into my head. Immediately I thought of that mannequin mother and child—and voilà. The image I had tucked away finally found its moment.
As I was working on this collage I couldn’t help thinking about the surprising symbolic parallels between the lullaby “Mockingbird” and the idea behind Operation Mockingbird—not as a literal link, of course, but as a thematic one that kept tugging at me. A mockingbird repeats what it hears. A lullaby soothes or distracts a restless child. And Operation Mockingbird was, in part, about shaping what the public heard through the media.
Those ideas began to merge: comfort as control, soothing as silencing, reassurance as distraction. I became fascinated by how the act of quieting a child—offering promises, gifts, or diversions—can mirror the ways governments or institutions sometimes attempt to pacify a population.
To me, this piece feels both nurturing and unsettling, which is how many people have described my work over the years—dark yet uplifting at the same time. It’s like a lullaby that’s comforting on the surface but carries a strange, haunting undertone when you look closer. I see similarities between a mother’s instinct to soothe and the mechanisms of a system trying to calm or redirect. How innocence and manipulation can share the same visual language.
I’m drawn to that duality.
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