Into the hat...

Thanks to all of you that made suggestions for ‘The Process’. The draw has been made and the sea captain’s hat has spoken.

Here is the result.


Into the hat…
Foxgloves
American dust bowl
Fruit pastilles
Lobster telephone
The power of the wind
Numnah
Synchronised swimmers
Peebles A-Z
Kaleidoscope
iPhone
Edinburgh fringe
Blu-ray

Out of the hat…
Synchronised swimmers
The Power of the wind
Kaleidoscope

And the hat…
As the process dictates the contents of the hat must have been worn by me and the connections must be my real experiences… here goes!

Kaleidoscopes, synchronised swimmers, and the power of the wind…

Did you ever have a kaleidoscope when you were a child? I did, in fact I must have had several kaleidoscopes over those short years of my childhood. I loved taking them apart you see.

That was always the thing with me and my toys, once I’d played with them a while, got used to them, bored with them, I found other things to do with them – things that often involved splitting them down into their basic components or finding new, different ways to play with them. My kaleidoscopes always ended up as some cardboard tubes, a few plastic beads and three silver plastic mirrors – and I could never get them back together again.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like the patterns they made - I did - but infinite and ever-changing variety can become boring after a while. I remember watching Busby Berkley movies as a child and being reminded of my kaleidoscope, all those legs and arms moving around in synchronisation, round and around, kick up, kick out - the camera suspended high above the action. I found it entertaining at first, but I soon tired of the spectacle. In the forties and Fifties Esther Williams did pretty much the same thing as Busby but with water - Synchronised swimming was all the rage for a while.

As a teenager I had a small collection of wind up swimming toys that I played with in the bath (please don’t tell) – ducks, penguins, fish, submarines, divers. For a while I was happy to race them or make them swim in elaborate patterns like the synchronised swimmers in the old movies I would watch on Sunday afternoons on our old black and white telly. But then the old curiosity would kick in and soon they were a collection of springs, bits of plastic, and tin - as my toys were picked apart fin by fin, flipper by flipper to see what they ‘might’ be.

Why did I do it?

For my fifth or sixth Christmas I was bought a grey Grundig reel-to-reel tape recorder. After only an hour or two of recording just about everything that could and should make noise I was bored with it. What fun I had attaching paper squares to the reels, pressing rewind, and pouring poster paint onto the paper - and what fantastic kaleidoscopic patterns that paint made… Until it got into the workings of the recorder and jammed solid.

Did it all begin there?

Clocks, cycle lamps, cap guns, torches, stylophones, all came apart in my quest to understand how things could be repurposed – and make no mistake - it wasn’t about me understanding how things worked, I wasn’t interested in that at all. I was only interested in what new thing might be made out of the old thing. I was interested in metamorphosis not engineering.

Is this what my beach sculptures are about, metamorphosing flotsam into creatures – and is it why I made my wind-chimes at the kiosk?

I’ve always been fascinated by the wind, it seems to have a power over me. I love the way it feels against my skin, the way it sounds when it whistles around the cottage. How perfect when I decided that wind-chimes would be the main theme for my kiosk on the pier. I bought dozens, all sizes, all types – butterflies, dolphins, bamboo, metal, tubular, spiral, strawberry, mystical, fish, shell, crystal, glass, plastic, fairy, pigs, dragonflies, seahorses. You imagine it - I had it - dozens of wind-chimes hanging from the roof, moving with the wind that all around blew in through the ever-open double doors.

It was wind-chime heaven, and they sold very well. After a while I began to make my own. Wind-chimes from painted glass, drilled slate shards, from spoons, and beads, and wave-washed wood, from polished stones, and curled silver wire, marbles, flat glass pebbles, plastic bottles, cups, string, seashells, starfish - I made and sold them all. It was probably one of the most creative times of my life and people loved them.

I wish I had pictures of all my creations. I’ll never forget the music of my chimes as the power of the wind tossed and turned them in the spluttering sunshine, making a kaleidoscope of colour as reflections swam in synchronised patterns across the white, wooden ceiling of my kiosk heaven.

One day when the angels ask me to recall the thrill of it all - when I have the time to make all the things that I want to make, the chimes, and vanes, and pictures made from stones, I shall answer… ‘I undo things and remake them… metamorphosis… I'm a student of metamorphosis.’