After researching the social and political contexts through which the ‘Found Object’ movement was born, I became intrigued with the synonymous movement of ‘Dada-ism’, which became popular during the 1920s in response to the horrors of World War One. ‘Dadaism’ featured prominent artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Salvador Dali, and utilised mediums focusing on collage, photography and mixed media in their works. The omnipresent aim throughout their artwork was to present everyday objects in a way that embodied the anarchic and political upheavals occurring at the time, in response to war.
Therefore, my initial thoughts when given this project were to utilise an everyday object or collection of objects which would not usually be considered art, and present them in a way to depict beauty and perfection, as artists such as Duchamp do effectively. As I have a keen interest in working with mixed media, in particular collage, photography, and sketching, as well as the concept of reconstruction, I began to brainstorm objects which could be presented through this. The idea of presenting scrap objects, such as broken furniture or broken ceramic, which I could then reconstruct to become compositions of beauty, became a central idea in my initial thought process.
In my next blog post, I will outline some of the key and most prominent artists from the ‘Dada’ movement which I have researched during my initial thoughts for this project.
