Walking rather slowly down a lane in Rushall......yesterday, I came across a piece of an old mantel clock....someone had thrown it out as hard rubbish. I was amazed to find the mechanisms still dinking with sounds. As I held it in my hands and moved it back and forth......the chime of it instantly took me back to my childhood and my Grandfather's work shed in the country.
Leonard had boxes of parts from all kinds of things.....clocks
, cars, transistors, cutlery, electrical devices and many many screws and bolts.
Grandfather gladly went into his shed most mornings filled with discarded remnants of the past. He was an Artist of sorts. Combinations of rubber stamps and half full bottles of ink. watercolour tubes and old printers blocks.....detritus of the publishing trade.
I was fascinated. The shed represented a world I loved to be in.
He was a WW2 Veteran .....drove a water tank through Syria across deserts and blown up terrain.
I loved my Pa so much.....he showed me how to operate my first silver watch....."This is the mechanism"....he said.
He was an individual investigator.
Elaborated on....diversified Dada artillery.......for my eyes only.
All along my art school path....I was told endless stories about postwar Cologne.
What was it all about really....I thought. A new idiom. The Dadaists drew from the material world and psychological terrain. They would articulate their radically altered sense of self and society.
My Pa was a backyard Dadaist ...so to speak...always weaving the pictorial with his unique productive synergy.......I was there and very young....but somehow his shed and the memory of his bits and pieces ..... a strong hold is inherent.
My work is filled with a semblance of memory and desire to create my own eclectic placements and installations......contradictoriness of my own systems....I enjoy the absurd and the unconscious. When he passed away I received two very memorable pieces belonging to him......a silk dressing gown and a pair of metal cuff links.......so light was the metal you could have easily swallowed them whole.
I saw him wear them a couple of times and as a child was aware of his well groomed presence each and every morning.......they were his fathers.....my great grandfathers.....now placed in England whence they came from.........for safe keeping.
Cosmetic device.
I am a DAdA related collage artist.
Madam Dada belongs to the exterior world.
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