Editing, experimentation and endless possibilities: Beorli shares the inspiration behind her surrealist worlds

"My latest work explores what might happen if we were to all uproot and move to a new planet," says Beorli of the bright-hued digital collaged images she makes. "From adapting to a new environment to creating a typical suburb, how long would it be before we created double of what we already have, despite having a fresh start?"

Each of the images that she creates holds this question at its core. Her work is a kaleidoscopic exploration of creative experiments, allowing her to pluck and play with ideas that emerge from the depths of her imagination – and an assortment of images.

Beorli, whose real name is Becky Orlinski, is a digital collage artist who has carved out an identity for herself since graduating in Communication Design at Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen and venturing into digital collage and photo manipulation.

Her decision to focus on digital collaging came from her love of working in Photoshop, but she knew she didn't want to be a photographer in the traditional sense. So she embraced uncertainty and engaged in an exploratory period, playing with different editing techniques and trying out different processes to learn as much as possible and find her unique aesthetic. From this emerged her interest in exploring narratives, photo editing, layering images and surrealism.

To create one of her digital collages, Orlinski works with hundreds of images at a time, knowing that "just one picture can alter the entire direction of the visuals on the screen and the story in my mind."

What you see on paper reflects what she holds in her imagination. Orlisnki will conceive of an idea before she gets to work on it – and it's often space exploration and entering the unknown that fascinates her most.

"My imagination is continually growing arms and legs," she says. "From the beginning, I've always pictured this new world with the hazy focus of an old film, so I try to bring this out in each of my collages. Even though each design is new, I spend so long working on them that they start to feel like I'm visualising a memory, and I want to bring that sense of nostalgia through to other people who are just seeing the design for the first time."

Since birthing her conceptual style during the pandemic, Beorli admits that this form of creativity is both cathartic and a work of self-expression.

She initiates the collage-making process by imagining the timeline she's creating and picking a specific moment to visualise. She then engages in a thorough search for images to form the base of the piece before manipulating images to weave them together: "I really enjoy visualising the story; it feels that the best way to convey the narrative is through paying attention to the tiny details."