Internationally renowned artist Sid Dickens – whose work is featured in more than 1000 stores worldwide – required a compelling story of his company’s early years for a high-quality industry publication. This is an excerpt:
Sid Dickens’ artistic tiles – called Memory Blocks – are now sold world-wide and regularly turn up in fashionable magazine photo spreads but the story of the tiles begins with the artist weighted down by 100 pound bags of plaster and spurred on by a bold idea.
In the early 1980s, Dickens spent a year at Vancouver’s prestigious Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design but quickly realised his inspiration wouldn’t be found in a textbook. Dickens then spent several years travelling through old Europe cultivating his interest in history and ancient ruins. Eventually, he anchored himself in San Miguel de Allende – Mexico’s cultural hotspot – where Dickens apprenticed with a master sculptor.
Once back in Canada, the idea and identity of the Memory Blocks were shaped over an extended period, particularly the work’s suggestive use of iconic imagery from the past. Dickens was interested in how the visual fragments of earlier cultures – from old manuscripts to architectural details to renaissance portraiture – could be used to express a language of memory. Dickens was curious to find a means of communicating something essential through something apparently ephemeral. But he had to make the work first to prove the idea. And that required a lot of bags of plaster.
At the time, Dickems’ studio was smudged into Vancouver’s downtown eastside – a fifth floor walk up that required all materials be lugged up without assistance. Bag after heavy bag of plaster would be carried up five floors on his shoulder almost to prove that the burden of creativity has a physical weight. Once he had all his materials he would sit on the floor for hours carefully building each tile individually. As Dickens explains:
I couldn’t afford tables, so I used to work on the floor. That’s my sob story. I’d sit there working on one thing a month.
After completing the first batches of tiles, close friends took notice and encouraged him to pursue their possible sale. But artists are rarely showmen. Artwork is often left to speak for itself as if some wind-up toy that can make its own pitch. Dickens is quietly reserved and remains reluctant to be a high-profile artist. It took years before the courage to sell his work equaled his interest in making it. Eventually the tiles made their way into a few high-quality shops in Vancouver but only after the artist grew tired of having to make ends meet by working summers as a deckhand on fishing boats. But it still wasn’t certain that he could make a living from making his art. That’s when he had the bold idea to go global. Or at least to New York.
