I went to see the Schwitters exhibition at the Tate. He was a German artist who was forced into exile by the Nazis prior to WWII, because they had labelled his artwork (Merz) as degenerate. He migrated first to Norway, then England when Norway was invaded. He was interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man. His work used many found objects, partly because he saw art in the everyday mundane, but also because when interned, the detritus of life was all they had to work with.
He commented "In Merz pictures, the boxtop, playing card and newspaper clippings become surfaces; string, brush stroke and pencil stroke become line; wire netting becomes overpainting or pasted on greaseproof becomes varnish; cotton becomes softness".
To my mind, collage was his forte, although he worked with oils, sculpture and other media, in order to inform his process. I liked the way small fragments of ephemera were carefully selected. A scrap of a Bassetts liquorice allsort box frames the coconut liquorice and aniseed ball jelly sweets to form two heads cuddling. The wrappings from American Red Cross packages, British newspapers, London Transport tickets and old German news cuttings indicate his reality at the time. A good historical representation of his identity at the time. I need to think more about how using the detritus of my "now" represents the time in which I am working. Louise Baldwin's work demonstrates this.
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