I like to take walks and stuff things I find in my pockets (and mind) for later use. I’ve always benefited from a magpie approach.
I recently came across an artist who made scavenging the source of her work. Rosalie Gascoigne (25 January 1917 – 25 October 1999) was a New Zealander-Australian sculptor who only began practicing as a serious artist at the age of 59. She went on to represent Australia in the Venice Biennale. Her wooden boxed assemblages were all composed of materials she found while on scavenging expeditions in the Canberra hinterland.
I love the way she describes her relaxed peripatetic approach (there is so much trust and so little strain): “I think that I spent a lot of time being sort of restless and out of step with everybody and restless, and not knowing what it was. And then I came to this thing I could do and it grew. And all you had to do was, as it were, hang loose, and just use your eye.”
(Rosalie Gascoigne, Magpie, 1998. Sawn wood on wood.)
