A brief note on naming: 'found materials' conjures up a textured mishmash of delights in the mind's eye (and for the mind's tactile appendage). I like the idea of stumbling upon something that you cannot forget and cannot let go of. One moment you didn't know it was there, and the next, you must muse upon it, create with it, use the images and imaginaries it refers to. Merriam and Webster tell me that material is the 'apparatus necessary for doing or making something.' An exclamatory yes! Doing and making are acts to be engaged in forevermore, certainly. Their nemesis-antithesis, Stasis, is obscene in the way it diminishes what was once a multi-hued color palate to only ambiguous grays – or bold lines into fuzzy, unfocused shapes always at a distance, if you will excuse what can only be metaphor. And apparatus decidedly calls forth images of French philosophers and machines. Found in itself points toward a kind of finding out that has taken place, and then is attached as adjective to whatever was found, urging a kind of perpetual (but always new) finding out – about people, places, the world, ourselves, what we see, what we enjoy, what terrifies us, what inspires us toward real wonder...
...so, if these two words are brief meditations on a kind of becoming, then let us go onward!
