"All
human experience is just one big collage."
Paolozzi
Editing my diary of Ten Days with
Paolozzi – a Masterclass held in Edinburgh College of Art – I have been struck by
how prescient he was of our future: of the role robots play, of the melding of
man, machine and robot, how technology is changing us as beings and the way we
interact with the world yet at the same time he ransacked cultures from the
past re-creating them in his own images.
He regarded the studio more like a kitchen or cauldron mixing stuff up and seeing
what emerges at the end.
On a personal level I found
my time with Paolozzi just as beneficial, if not more so, in some ways than
four years at Glasgow School of Art because with Paolozzi one had a link direct
to the past – he had met Braque, Arp, Giacometti, Leger, Dubuffet, Miro and
Tristan Tzara in Paris.
And in a strange way the process
of turning this diary into a book means I am re-living that time in Ediburgh College of Art and in a vicarious way touching these seminal figures from our artistic
past.
