(fr) Créée sur du papier brun, cette peinture captivante capture l’énergie vibrante du quartier de Swiss Cottage. Collée avec de la colle PVA pour bois, elle présente une texture riche et profonde, et est finie avec une couche de vernis pour bois afin d’améliorer son attrait visuel et sa durabilité. L’œuvre reflète mon enfance passée au Swiss Cottage open space, où j’ai participé à un groupe de jeu après que notre ancien bâtiment à Belsize Park a été temporairement fermé à cause de l’amiante, et avant cela, mes expériences autour du marché de Swiss Cottage. Créée pendant une période de réflexion à la suite du décès de la reine Élisabeth II, cette œuvre d’art soulève des questions importantes sur le rôle de l’art communautaire dans nos vies.
(en) Created on brown paper, this captivating painting captures the vibrant energy of the Swiss Cottage neighbourhood. Glued with PVA wood glue, it has a deep, rich texture and is finished with a coat of wood varnish to enhance its visual appeal and durability. The work reflects my childhood spent at Swiss Cottage open space, where I participated in a playgroup after our old building in Belsize Park was temporarily closed due to asbestos, and before that, my experiences around the Swiss Cottage market. Created during a period of reflection following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, this artwork raises important questions about the role of community art in our lives.
In autumn of 2012, after six months in Paris, I moved to 49 rue Daguerre. After one year, we were evicted. I was allowed to rent the basement cave, where I left my possessions for one year while I travelled around the world and attempted to scale Underground Paris — a webzine and experimental in-destination tours and activities, guided tours and art classes. But I made one massive mistake: I made myself homeless at the same time.
Needless to say, I lost myself in between the various transfers through LAX during six months, followed by six months of life in Paris with no fixed abode. I was, however, making enough not to think about buying flights to any part of the world on a whim — and that’s pretty much what I did. The startup business plans were dropped after the first four-week backpacking pilot, after renouncing the stability that had led me to be a minor success story.
What I understood only in the last year or was that Agnès Varda had lived at 86 rue Daguerre. I can’t prove that we were in contact during the year when I lived on the street — how far does a person’s electromagnetism cause others to connect psychologically? All signs, as far as I know, point to her having played a role in my life. I’ve flitted from one home to another since 1999, when I left my parents’ home to live in my own place — a small one-bed flat in Kilburn, close to the theatre now called Kiln. Varda was born under the sign of Gemini.
Will Self was near to me recently as I walked from Latimer Road along Oxford Gardens and past the tidy Victorian terraces on Finstock Road, when I felt my mother’s tears ring through me. I stopped walking to take stock. Had the indirect contact with Will Self — a disgraced heroin user, esteemed writer and professor of psychogeography at Brunel — made her think I was going to end up taking drugs again? She still hasn’t recovered from when I lied to her in 1996 about using (white doves). “Are you taking drugs?” she asked her emaciated, Adidas three-stripe tracksuit-wearing, glow stick-harbouring, music-obsessed son. With batted eyelashes, I gruntingly retorted: “No.”
No, it was that I’d failed at getting myself into the set who lived in those terraced houses, and that my route there — being a graffiti tourism entrepreneur — had been abandoned because it wasn’t directly related to the polite Daunt Books bag-carrying scene of which I so wished to be a part.
My family couldn’t look me in the eye because I had sought to distance myself from the illegal graffiti I got into through taking drugs with the naughty kids who lived on the council estate, who climbed onto the train tracks to paint graffiti. My mother mourned my detachment from the underground music scene that informed these graffiti tours and workshops I did. I had stopped tagging up, and this had caused my life to distance itself from the source of my power: drugs, music, illegal graffiti.
How could I have done this to my mother? I thought to myself, and decided there and then — last Friday or Thursday, I think — to suck it up, sacrifice my high-falutin poetic aspirations, and get back on the graff and get a home and stay in that home, for as long as humanly possible.