The Wilderness of Stories

An Illustration by Jim Kay, from the novel A Monster Calls. Written by Patrick Ness from the ideas of Siobhan Dowd.

The novel tells the story of Conor, a school boy and his mother who is suffering from terminal cancer. The novel is accompanied by utterly beautiful illustrations. I felt they concentrated the pain and emotions of the story in a completely graphic way.

There are further illustrations, by Jim Kay from the book here

note to self

I got a letter from myself this morning. I wrote it in 2006 in the G39 Gallery in Cardiff as part of a work by artist Jennie Savage. I vaguely remember I had gone into the gallery to meet someone and come across the exhibition by chance. I scribbled the letter out as I was waiting for them. I didn't know how long I would be waiting. The letter ended abruptly when the person arrived.

I wrote whatever came to mind in those few minutes. It's a strip of consciousness cut out of five years ago and delivered to me on a cold Saturday, after breakfast. There are two other strangers in the room with me. They seem to be nervous. One is playing with their mobile phone. They look at the exhibit but don't write a letter. I'm aware of them, and a list of other jobs that flit through my memory. Always lists of jobs to do. Flowers. Jobs still at the back of my memory-list five years later.

I photograph the letter this morning: the stamped impression, the fragments of the text. Photographing it makes me start to read down the text in columns rather than in a linear way. It goes like this:



downstairs
he's talking
downstairs
present this



when I go and put some
yesterday. Why
the text



I spoke
some flowers
Why

In the five years since I created the letter I have thought about that afternoon several times and waited for the letter to return. It surprised me this morning. I thought it would be longer coming. 2015, or something like that. I think I liked it more as an im-material memory than a material object sitting on the table in front of me.

Maybe it's time to throw it away.

This is no reflection on piece itself, Savage's work has created a longevity of reflection for this participant, I have returned to the idea time and again to since its creation.

A couple of years ago when I found fifteen-year-old undeveloped rolls of film hidden amongst a drawer of detritus, I realised that here was another time machine waiting to suprise me. I blogged the photos here. Since then I have been occasionally stashing rolls of film about the house to be found and developed at some undecided point in the future.

Note to self: must take some more films and add them to the pile.

For Jenny's reflections on the project look here.

Calle

The character of a city can always be seen in the style of street signs. London signs them in monotonous block capitals embossed on iron. Madrid on tiles with beautiful images recalling the name. Bogota street signs have the drama and romance of magical realism. Letters dance across the stone. Sloping tails of letters sweep into their neighbours. Letters merge with each other to create ideograms. I wanted to stop on every street corner.

dsc

my first digital camera, shortly to be made redundant.

jardin

I love signs in the sky.

not books

I reckon I must have kept notebooks from about the age of 13 until a couple of years ago. Somehow at that point a personal notebook seemed less important. Maybe these blog things were the surrogate. Anyhow, I still find these things knocking about occassionally and flick through them. (Before sticking them in the bin. I know. It's brutal. Creative destruction.)

Unfortunately, they don't have the comic cringe factor of Richard Herring's adolescent notebooks so I can't make a stand-up career out of reading them. They do contain the odd gem in them. One thing I always did was draw. Not from real life but instead of painting, photographs or by pausing a DVD and drawing the still. I liked the way which a picture or a piece of art revealed itself when you forced your hand and eye to follow it.



Then a bit later in my notebooks there are lots of these.



guides from the darkroom. Hours spent mucking about: burning and dodging.

Glastonbury: the invisible city

Robin tells me 'I spend a lot of time thinking about being at Glastonbury when I am not here'. Likewise, I think I will spend much of the coming year drifting through it's fields.

Glastonbury is not the name of a festival but a city that emerges from its visitors' dreams and desires for one week each year. As walked through the festival site for the final time, at about six am on Monday, it was covered in an ethereal, thick fog. It seemed that this place was already losing it's material form and returning to dream and memory.


(C) David Foster 2010