Annie's sweet art dreams

Annie Lennox's new visual art show features collages made from phone images. It could be the first of many, she tells Charlotte Cripps

She's best known as the Eurythmics singer and co-songwriter of hits including, "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" and "Thorn in My Side", but Annie Lennox is currently staging her first ever – very low-key – visual art show.

Even though she calls herself a "visual artist" rather than a "photographer", Lennox has been busy snapping locations in Manchester and Salford on her mobile phone to create a collection of photographic collages.

"I have always been a very visual person," says Lennox, who looks for beauty in strange places like "diamonds in mud.

"I really got into photography four years ago, " she adds. "For me, pointing and clicking my phone is absolutely fine. People say that isn't the art of photography but I don't agree. You have to have a good eye and it's the result that matters. "

Her 19 prints in the show titled, Glorious Manford Salchester, (a play on Manchester and Salford), which runs until next week at the Lowry Hotel, Salford, pay homage to the North-west of England, combining snapshots of Old Victorian industrial buildings, urban wastelands, skylines, street graffiti and flowers. She constantly records things she finds herself intuitively drawn to in everyday life, particularly the past.

"I am fascinated by history and particularly the Victorian era," says Lennox. "Manchester and Salford was the hub of the whole industrial revolution during the British Empire."

Kaleidoscopic prints with repeated single images show roads that lead to nowhere, juxtaposed with a slither of yellow flowers and floating buildings in the sky that look like they are sinking into the sea.

The abstract collages contrast pretty lace and open blue sky with barbed wire, foreboding walls and Manchester Cathedral. Glass-fronted office blocks reflect the sky on the windows.

While many are powerful works, including a Manchester street in the sky that looks like a meteorite about to crash into Earth, others look like she has been cutting and pasting from Google Images.

Only a few prints are uncomplicated, including a photograph of David Begbie's sculpture in the Lowry Hotel of a female figure reflected on the wall, which she has then multiplied. "There is a severe lack of people in my pictures," says Lennox. "It's ironic as a lot of people take photos of me."

It was in March that Lennox had a brainwave to put on a serious visual art show. She was staying at the Lowry Hotel when the touring V&A retrospective show House of Annie Lennox stopped off at the Lowry Centre in Salford Quays.

On the first floor of the hotel she came across the Comme Ca Art (CCA) gallery, where there was a photo exhibition of pop stars eating their favourite food in aid of the Teenage Cancer Trust.

Her 19 Entertainment team, run by Simon Fuller contacted CCA dealers in Manchester to set up a meeting between Lennox and its owner Claire Turner to develop the singer's idea.

"She showed me images on a computer that she had taken with a phone," says Turner, who is now Lennox's art dealer. "Then Annie came up with the idea to turn them into photographic collages. You can read a lot more into them than first meets the eye," she says.

Lennox then toured Manchester and Salford in a van for the day – jumping out with her assistant and Turner – "I was on such a high it was brilliant" – to "point and click" her mobile phone at things.

"I've got this bag of imagery like beads, and I just found the first image I was drawn to and then started to play with it. Then I introduced another image that would change the meaning of the first by clashing or harmonising with it," says Lennox. "It's the same as when I'm writing songs. I've always done it very intuitively, starting with one line."

While this small and local exhibition in Salford is "a thank you" to the people at the Lowry "who were so kind to me", the prints are on sale online on the CCA website. Limited editions of 100 hand-signed prints cost from £200 to £400.

The ones proving to be the most popular include Print 6, which if you look closely, shows Lennox's reflection. In the collage of daisies and Manchester's worker bee symbols, you see the top of Lennox's head and arm with a mobile phone reflected in a glass window with 1804 etched on it.

"I want people to feel connected and transported by familiar things that might otherwise be unseen or overlooked. In my view, everything is contradictory, mysterious, inaccessible, insignificant, and yet thoroughly meaningful and profound at the same time."

Lennox is planning another series of new photographic collages next year in Manchester. But in the meantime, she is taking time out, in between her activist work in aid of HIV and women's rights. "I just got married in September [to South African charity chief Mitch Besser] so I'd like to spend some time being married," says Lennox. "But if photography turns into a career, I will welcome it because I'm loving it."