ARTISTS TALKING

# 2 [3 February 2010]

I started my investigations this week. 

Already my first instinct has been confirmed. There is a space under the Magdalen Street fly-over; a bit of derelict ground which has such an acute air of isolation though right next to the busy street, where even weeds don't grow for lack of light, and I can't help visualising some stone circle. It seems it was the site of "Stumps Cross", a broken wooden or stone (versions differ) cross, regarded as a relic in the 15th century it must have been a very powerful landmark indeed.  

Also, dear friends pointed me in the direction of ghost stories, and I have spent a pleasant day in the library searching out tales of terror; A man who on nightly walks strewn the streets with the severed and boiled limbs of his first wife; A woman boarded into her house with her dead, plague ridden family who she took to eating and even then did not survive; And "Lollards Pit" where people were burnt for heresy or witchcraft and the crowds would throw those who crawled out back in with great glee and cheers.

But for all the discovery, the patterns are out of my reach this week, the bricks unusually quiet.

But it will come.

# 1 [29 January 2010]

I saw this morning that they have finally finished demolishing St James Place. It has happened quickly, and now there are just great mounds of bricks being covered by snow.

It reminds me of the death of the grain store by the football ground. It took twelve, maybe thirteen days for them to demolish because the structure was made of concrete riddled with iron. I went every day to photograph it. Each hit from the pathetic wreckers ball caused it to shudder in misery, it appeals to me with twisted metal writhing and reaching out from slow wounds. Truly a death by a thousand cuts.

I have lived here all my life. I wanted to move, go to university in a strange city like everybody else, but the only degree I wanted to do was here. So I stayed.

 
For a while I hated the place, it is small enough that all your sins will catch up with you eventually but after a while you learn to navigate them. They walk a different path from you so you hardly ever meet; we walk round with a map our heads, our routes and theirs, like animals territories.

Now I know this city so intimately that it is built of associations. I start to see connections, webs, maps, systems that take years to discern. You have to stick it out.

In 18 months I will leave.