For Colquhoun, collage and the use of found objects were automatic techniques. ‘Surely’, she wrote, ‘such objects are found through the use of the automatic faculty?’ (1) She saw them as visual equivalents of Lautreamont’s verbal collage that had so inspired the surrealists. In the early 1960s Colquhoun began to use found materials in her work. When acknowledging her debt to Duchamp and Schwitters, she wrote that “it was the ‘ready throw-away’ which inspired me”. (2) Re-framing the ‘ready made’ as the ‘ready throw-away’ is a good example of Colquhoun’s general facility to take an alternative perspective to the conventional and orthodox.
Many of Colquhoun’s constructions, such as Ripples (1971) or Cornish Landscape, (1971) are made from packaging. Packaging forms a temporary container. Its purpose is to surround and contain an object. In Colquhoun’s hands the packaging has been transformed into the object, itself packaged within a frame. These constructions express, almost literally, Breton’s belief that ‘surreality would be embodied in reality itself and be neither superior nor exterior to it. And reciprocally, too, because the container would also be the contents’ (3) Some, such as Embryo Fetish (1965), Ephesian Diana (1967 and Open Entrance (1971) mark the increasing importance of goddess religions in her life.
Her collages test our notions of reality and undermine the ways in which we normally perceive the world. Klingsor’s Castle, (1981) challenges the laws of perspective. Another, Bird of Passage (1963), associates human travel with the migration of birds. In World Moth (1960) Colquhoun has found the form of a moth in lines of longitude.
Although Colquhoun executed a significant number (over forty constructions and collages were exhibited at Exeter in 1970 and Newlyn the following year) very few of the constructions are currently traceable. Several of those that can be traced are in poor condition. Given their poor durability, It is tempting to think that the readymades have, with the assistance of time, unmade themselves and recycled themselves back into the rubbish from which they were born and from which she gave them temporary life.
Notes
1. Colquhoun, I. Notes on Automatism. Melmoth No. 2 1980. pp 31-32.
2. Exhibition catalogue: Penzance, Newlyn-Orion Galleries, 27th February - 23rd March 1976. Ithell Colquhoun: Surrealism, Paintings, Drawings, Collages 1936-76. The quotation is from the artist’s introductory essay.
3. Breton, A. Surrealism and Painting. Translated by Simon Watson Taylor, Harper and Row, New York, 1972. p46.
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