“All human experience is just one big collage.” Paolozzi
Editing my diary of Ten Days with Paolozzi – a Masteclass 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 ten days 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 Edinburgh College of Art and in a vicarious way touching these seminal figures from our artistic past.
