(Design magazine page) Geometry race (Su’s secret Santa paper) and Bell Tower Communication painting
I had left the bright red Chinese lanterns next to the canal in South Tottenham, but they seem to have floated back to the shore again. One is broken and has lost its steel axis, the other two (one with its dragon dressing) are intact – they’re currently drying out on the radiator. Meanwhile I discard of the broken one in the large commercial waste bin next to the Italian restaurant at the bottom of the road. I do this in the cover of darkness and use the fairy lights hanging down across the restaurant’s front window as my screen.
I have stopped using lanterns as before they were over used. The two that are still intact are now dry, deflated and stored in the dark olive green bag I was given by the Chinese shop assistant when I first bought them in London. I remember that day – it was hot and the capital smog attached itself to my limbs. The gift shop I went in to was respite from the sun, I saw tits and vaginas splayed across magazine covers as my eyes stroked lanterns hanging from the ceiling in all manner of shapes and sizes.
Now I sit in my flat in Glasgow, its cold, windy and stormy and I have just packed the last of my DVDs in to a box. I am laid on the granny bed futon in the kitchen drinking luke-warm coffee and I notice a drawing framed last year, by myself, depicting two runners with hats in the Scottish countryside racing across a stream. In their hands they hold long branches snapped from near by trees – at the extremities of these branches three Chinese lanterns wave with exulted momentum: their design is novel for the scene that is otherwise set by browns and purples lucid with dampening rain.
Set beneath the drawing in the frame, acting as its mount, is a yellow page I used in an installation piece (again last year). It sets out a number of names, of people unknown to me, the page was ripped from a design magazine – ripped out of context purely for its formal characteristics. It depicts encompassing circular forms like a chart: a periodic image of who may have won which race at which time perhaps.
Another frame I keep to hold an older and dustier piece of work: a small idea-based painting of scarlet red shapes upon a lined light affect non-acid-free paper. It is lined as if an obsolete address card. With the paint marks – copied from the altar tile-design situated where an installation once completed the painting’s reasoning – sit pencil strokes and notes for further ideas. It is a sketch foremost but sits, non-the-less, lightly and comfortably in the frame.
Set beneath the painting in the frame, acting as a mount, is a piece of wrapping paper that once wrapped my boss’s secret Santa gift. She discarded the wrapping paper after carefully retrieving the present inside – it is of floral design and displays subdued colours that compliment the dishevelled tone of the light affected address card.
From the broken lantern I kept hold of one thing. This thing is a yellow tassel that once hung down from the bottom of the lantern with yellow and red string, the weight of the tassel is a small green globe of plastic. This tassel rests now on top of the aforementioned frame…
