Despite having an engineer for a father, Paul Spooner went to art school and despite receiving an art education from three of the titans of the business, Harry Thubron, Jon Thompson and Tom Hudson, he never became a proper artist but, in his early thirties, took up the then almost extinct profession of automatist.
A series of fortunate circumstances led him from the schoolteaching and lorry driving jobs he’d done after art school; he moved to Cornwall with his wife Sue, he met Peter Markey, who had been making mechanical sculptures and selling them in Sue Jackson’s shop, Cabaret, in Falmouth.
