Need for speed: Joel Clark's auto-inspired art

I grew up near Silverstone and have always loved motorsport – that's why my artistic work has always gravitated towards this world. When I finished school, I started designing and making vinyl stickers for race teams based at the circuit. I left home to go to art college and to later pursue a career in advertising, but have now gone full-circle and returned to the skills I learnt in my first job.

All my work is created from hand-cut vinyl. It's a very versatile material – it's the same as that used to make the signage on trucks and vans, shop windows and other items you commonly see. I cut the material into lots of smaller shapes and overlay them, creating a collage effect. Because of this, I can form it on to smaller objects such as visors and crash helmets to make pieces such as the bespoke works I created in collaboration with Turnbull & Asser, the gentleman's outfitter.

I initially started by doing pictures of cars and replicating them in vinyl. But then I wanted to do something beyond flat scenes, so I found a car door on eBay and thought: "I wonder how I could make this look?" Since then, I've done everything from small rear-view mirrors to huge American muscle-car hoods. My style is my little homage to Pop Art, which has always been one of my biggest influences.

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You can take influences from original imagery and I always ask clients to put together a couple of reference shots, or just something they like; then I'll go off and find loads of images and put some options together and we go from there. It's all hand-cut vinyl, so I buy vinyl off the roll, let's say one or two metres of a block colour. I often work from photographs as source material. I work out the type of crops I want, blow up images to the size I'm after and then I literally tape the photocopy to the top of the vinyl, whichever colour. Once you've done that, you just start cutting out by hand. Essentially it's a collage. Then I get an actual car body-shop to apply a finish over the top.

I now get the car parts I work on – doors, bonnets – from eBay, or from a client of mine who builds racing Porsche replicas; for example, I've done a Porsche 917 door with a reflection of Steve McQueen's 917 from the 1971 film Le Mans in it. People hang the car panels up as a piece of wall sculpture. I can do actual vehicles too, if people want me to. Because vinyl is flexible, it can go over the curve of a crash helmet or car door – you just have to cut the shapes to work over that particular surface and obviously you can overlay. It all becomes tactile, almost like a painting. I've done my own graphics for my motorbike. But my goal is to cover an entire car – creating my own "art car".

JOEL CLARK is an artist who uses vinyl to create automotive-inspired artworks; joelclarkartist.artweb.com