Schwitters in Lakeland
I first came to love both the Merz collages of Kurt Schwitters and the landscape of the Lake District at around the same time, in my mid teens (the late 1960s).
With Schwitters, it was through a copy of Hans Richter’s Dada: Art and Anti-Art, found (surprisingly) in our local library. As for the Lakes, it was the annual family holidays we took up the newly opened M6 to a cottage with a view of the mountains on the western horizon.
I was therefore delighted to discover that Schwitters himself had spent the last years of his life in the small Lakeland town of Ambleside. Whenever we stopped there, I would slip away to visit his grave and leave whatever I had in my pocket. That is where this work began and it continues to the present day.
