Bricolage is my underpinning.
This is my first entry into my first ever blog. Posting will be occasional and random, in other words a bricolage of words. What is bricolage? Simply put, it is the art of making do, of working with what you have. Bricolage is the art of everyday: cheap and made of discarded everyday materials. It brings together the localised and the globalised.
By taking apart and putting together, whether art or words, I find patterns of ideas. As with my art, I collect words and poems, ideas and articles, pictures, stories and quotes. I play with their order.
Just as I spent my childhood hoarding stuff, organising it, and then making things from it, I used to collect words. I had a series of black hardcover notebooks with red spines, A6 in size, where I would collect facts. Each notebook contained a different set of facts. There was a horse notebook and an illegal drug notebook. There were country notebooks. I used to carry them around in a duffle bag as I was never sure what facts I would be encountering that day. I also produced magazines in school exercise books, where I was editor, journalist and artist. I still have these. All these words I collected and used.
Despite an underlying structure, my writing undulates and occasionally bulges or even escapes from its subject headings. This does not make it random or accidental, but a path and order that I have selected from a myriad of possibilities, just as I select a path for my making. After much struggling with this writing, I have finally discovered that it is as creative an opportunity as making.
By taking apart and putting together, whether art or words, I find patterns of ideas. As with my art, I collect words and poems, ideas and articles, pictures, stories and quotes. I play with their order.
Just as I spent my childhood hoarding stuff, organising it, and then making things from it, I used to collect words. I had a series of black hardcover notebooks with red spines, A6 in size, where I would collect facts. Each notebook contained a different set of facts. There was a horse notebook and an illegal drug notebook. There were country notebooks. I used to carry them around in a duffle bag as I was never sure what facts I would be encountering that day. I also produced magazines in school exercise books, where I was editor, journalist and artist. I still have these. All these words I collected and used.
Despite an underlying structure, my writing undulates and occasionally bulges or even escapes from its subject headings. This does not make it random or accidental, but a path and order that I have selected from a myriad of possibilities, just as I select a path for my making. After much struggling with this writing, I have finally discovered that it is as creative an opportunity as making.