We believe in the specific. Scrambled eggs in a pub by the sea, sunlight on stubble, chairman Mao moneyboxes, hand-drawn frown lines, falafel floating on Cuppasoup and deep, rusty scratches.
Precision is in a verb used correctly, but unusually. Precision is in incongruity. Precision is in odd, but happy marriages like bin juice and Majorelle blue, or a Pilates mat and a Chablis cupcake. Any of these concepts are vague when alone, but in a couple or threesome come to (exact and clear) life.
It’s as if every object, sense or thought is a pick-up stick. All these sticks are dropped from a height and fall angled and tangled, deep, thin, and at random. A moment is the intersecting point of these thin wooden sticks. What are you doing right now? What are the sticks which meet and make the moment one that has never come before and will never come again? Find those sticks and that moment will never be lost. Right now, here, I have biro on my hand, my shoes are tight and wet and I can still taste mandarin yoghurt. That’s the truth about how my pick up sticks lie right this second.
Then someone takes his or her go at the game, or I take a go myself. Somewhere, someone pulls out a pick-up stick. There is change - a lot or a little – enough for the moment to shift. That’s fine. I don’t have biro on my hand anymore or I can taste burned aftershave now, but even if my previous moment is no longer true, I know which sticks made it, so I have it, solid.
We believe in paper, canvas, celluloid, clay – firm form. Art should be holdable, foldable – destroyable, if needs be. If something is in your hands, you choose its future. Like it and you can put it in the tin where you keep old loves and new condoms. Don’t like it and you can bin it, burn it, or turn it into something else.
A Tale Of Three Cities will exist in real, touchable, paper copy. Ink is where it’s at. Words and photos and drawings. These things we make are important. Let us keep them in our hands.