How do you uncage your imagination? Or can you?

I am currently working with Tim Pigott-Smith and he arranged an early entrance this morning into the Picasso Sculpture exhibit currently on display at Moma.  To say I was inspired is an understatement.  The first sculptures begin around 1902 when Picasso would have been about 21.  Nothing there is very surprising, you see a young artist experimenting with a new medium.  Then you go into the next room and chuckle at the fact that he's trying things out in cardboard and then when he transfers the design to metal he is a bit stuck because he doesn't know how to weld.  To join the pieces together he uses metal wire as the strings of the guitar and actually 'sews' the metal together.  

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As you enter the next room you learn that he has been commissioned to create a monument to Apollinaire.  He arranges to study with a metal smith and learns the technique of welding and joining metal.  He then creates, first in miniature and then finally a massive piece that is currently outside in the sculpture garden.   He's now in his late 40s.

During the war years 1939-1945, when bronze was scarce he utilized found objects.  This is when the exhibit really came alive for me.  He would find things on the street as he walked to the studio and could somehow SEE things that weren't there - YET!  A bicycle seat and handlebars become a bull's head.  A napkin becomes a dog.  The head of a shovel becomes the feathers of a crane.

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Over and over again I would look closely at these sculptures and wonder how one became the other.  How do you look past the reality of what it is and pull together all the pieces to make it what it can be.  I can only imagine his studio being cluttered with all the things we see as junk and what he saw as a wing, a finger, hair, an eye.  

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Using plaster and found objets - a toy car - he creates the form and then has it cast in bronze. 1951 age 70

In his late 60's he works with a potter to learn the techniques of ceramics.  Once he is comfortable he goes on to make it his own. 

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The Crane

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Forks become feet, a faucet becomes the head.

Where is our imagination and what keeps it behind these imaginary bars.  I envision my imagination behind bars because I really think it's there and sometimes I feel like it's just out of my grasp but that something is keeping it at bay.   What are those bars made of?  How do we tear them down and what happens then?  

Of course the obvious fear is that my tendency to pull things out of the trash will become a real problem. :)