His work and input into the Independent Group were integral to the rethinking and reworking of British visual culture at the time. Many of the artists would collaborate on artworks and swap ideas or layouts. This was a moment of significant technological change not dissimilar to the impact of digital photography or the internet today.
McHale curated a Collages And Objects exhibit at the ICA in 1954, where he first exhibited his formative Pop Art collages including the Shoe-Life series. The whole collection is now held at Yale and comprises collage books, drawings, posters, periodicals and ephemera.
Two years later he participated in the This Is
Tomorrow exhibition. He supplied a good deal of the visual material having returned from Yale with a black metal trunk full to the brim with magazine clippings, posters and photographs. It has been claimed that Richard Hamilton’s pop art collage poster Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? was roughly laid out by McHale and some of the elements came from his own collection of ephemera.
McHale became ever more fascinated in machines and their interaction with human beings and tried to predict what the future would hold in terms of technological development. In 1957 he produced another set of collages called Machine-Made
America. The second in the series was used for the cover of The Architectural Review that May.
Five years later he moved permanently to the US to work on ecological issues. With his wife he founded their own future studies organisation investigating the long-term consequences of scientific and technological developments on mankind and the environment.
