The city is a vessel that can carry the tired mind
floor of a thousand lost shoes. Installation shot May 09
This is my Homage to a thousand city folk, those who linger, those who march, walk slowly, rush through the urban jungle as predators. The city can act as a container for our dreams, a maze in which we can act out our fantasies in flights of fancy and fluxus of uncertainty. The city is a vessel that can carry the tired mind, we position ourselves, set up our camps and begin to try and conquer. This is a life of uncertainty each day a new step in another direction leads to another hope and another musing of possibility. What does the city dream, what peace and tranquillity does it hold amongst its tumultuous waters. This is a city where all co-exist, a hierarchy of non form and through the muddled definitions and whispers we begin to form a new shape, a city that we can call home. A city of dreams. A city of reality. A city of distraction and voyeurism. We all use the city, abusing its streets day after a day with our heavy moulded foot prints. We use the city to take use to where we want be, what building do we work in, what route takes us there, who can envisage the city as its wishes, does the city have wishes or is an amalgamation of all of dream scapes, so jagged in their collective form that all separate is lost, except to the power of individual perception. I never loved a city truly. always waiting for the next, fleeting glances of an uncertain comfort, a terror of settling too deep and wishing each night that the things I have left behind are safe warm and happy. The city can warrant a short stay of idealism that breeds discontent and then you move to the next, till you decide the countryside would be a better bet, a safer solution to this crisis. The city does warrant a long term home. The man who sits in the café each day the same seat at all the same times and all the same people pass him and some sit and share a cup of tea and watch his world pass by him. He has been there over twenty years the café owner says, it feels longer than me. Is this the city? These are the people who have seen more and know more than any tour guide could ever highlight with a padded microphone. The city of dreams? The city of daily life and routine. This is a place where we each make our own rules. But there are sets we forget that we are keeping too. We walk at the same pace as the person in front of us on the escalator, we wear smart clothes when we have too, we buy tickets for the trains, we stand in line, is this civil respect or conforming to yet another reality that we conform too and don’t even remember why or at what point that began to become daily life. A utopia is a self constructed dream field. A utopia is a result of an unfulfilled society. The city of a thousand lost walks, Paths that lead to everywhere and nowhere and some where but else where. The paths that cross but never interlink, merged force. The tubes of a congested lung where we hurtle ourselves down dirty dank passages to half grasped success. I came here to succeed they whisper at dawn half light six years after a slow arrival. The man watches the days pass, wondering when such success will grasp him through such dull light. The book of a lost traveller is found thirty years later, it is empty, except for a pile of paper clipped expense receipts. This city is my muse, the city as a non entity, which only flusters the calm gull. The city of dreams, a homage to lost dreams and forgotten walks. There can be no stillness, we burn candles to remember what should have been.
Urban re:passages 
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