Enchanted A4
Sheffield, Winter 2009
After doing lots of drawing, I started to get a bit conceptual. I guess I was reading about Duchamp at around this time, and processing his 50cc of Paris Air. I realised that you could do poetic stuff with paper, without having to do any drawing on it at all.
The first and probably the best one I did was this one, above. I took a piece of a4 paper out to the Peak District, shoved a stick through one side of it and flew it on top of a giant boulder on Burbage Moor in the middle of a rainstorm at full moon. Oh and I took a photo of it, for posterity. Or to make it into art, or something.
This spot was where friends of mine would gather at full moon to goof around and sleep out under the stars. They had mostly moved on by then, so I guess it had a bit of a mournful vibe to it.
Then I figured I could make it into a series, so I started putting bits of paper into different situations.
For this one, I put the a4 sheet into a old, slightly ajar grave overnight at the beautiful Sheffield General Cemetary. It came out nibbled - by what, I don't know. Probably a slug though, or a mouse. Definitely not a cadaver desperate to communicate.
I put this one on and ran it in a one man race, photographing it as I raced along through the dark, wet leaf sodden streets of Sharrow, along where the art university building used to be when it was up at Psalter Lane. I ran and ran and ran and at the end I ducked forward and crossed the invisible finish line first, and last.
I stole this one from Staples. Just one sheet - no-one would ever notice. But it felt good. And bad. And good. I had a friend of mine document this one as it would have been difficult to do alone. I can still remember the furtive feeling of opening a packet of paper and slipping out one single, naughty little sheet.
This one I put under my pillow to have a dream on. It took ages, days and days before I finally had a dream I could remember. Unfortunately, I don't remember what it was about now. I do know that when I took a photo of it, my camera did that weird thing you can see where it glistched the last part of the image. It felt fitting for a dream photo somehow. A device glitching reality, like what dreams do.