P a r e n t l e s s ,   D e a f b l i n d   a n d   B r a i n   I n j u r e d

 

C a n c e r o u s ,   i n   D e c l i n e   a n d   G e n i t a l l y   M u t i l a t e d

 

THE FIRST LIGHT OF DAY FINDS YOU STANDING ON THE PLATFORM'S EDGE. 

Still slain by lack of sleep, you struggle on board and make directly towards the nearest available seat. Sitting down and gazing out across the carriage's walls at the photographs printed on posters seeking to help raise money for various humanitarian and animal welfare causes, your heart suddenly constricts and your mind starts racing.

A minute passes, followed by another and then another and still another after that.

Meanwhile, the longer you sit there staring at the posters, the more your thoughts grow more and more unsettled, and the more unsettled they get, the more unsettled in yourself you feel.  

 

 

 

P a t t e r n s    

2014,...

 

67 x 63 cm

 

Charity fundraising posters publicising various humanitarian and animal welfare causes, reclaimed from British trains, cut and woven with one another into a medium triaxial weave, one of the strongest known to humanity at this time.

 

 

 

 

 

The first light of day finds you standing at the platform's edge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

Still slain by lack of sleep, you struggle on board and make directly towards the nearest available seat.

 

    Sitting down and gazing out across the carriage's walls at the charity posters seeking to help raise money for various humanitarian and animal welfare causes, your heart suddenly constricts and your mind starts racing.

 

    A minute passes, followed by another and then another and still another after that.

 

    Meanwhile, the longer you sit and stare at the posters, the more your thoughts grow more and more unsettled, and the more unsettled they get, the more restless in yourself you feel.

 

    Because you know already in a few minutes you're going to alight from the train without sending a donation via text to a single charity, and when it happens you'll strenuously make the point of telling yourself that it's not because you're close-fisted or hard-hearted, that you're so incapable of seeing beyond your own little world's petty problems that you've become so utterly inured to the plight of others that their suffering has ceased to hold any importance to you, but because you firmly hold to the principle that no sentient being is more or less important than any other, that whether human or animal everyone and everything, every living thing capable of thought and feeling has the equal right to be observed and treated the same, and hence back there on the train and on the basis of that principle you'll have decided  it unnatural, inappropriate, even false to have chosen to help and thereby privilege one group of humans or animals over another, and by way of conclusion, in a few a minutes from now when you swipe out and exit the station, and pick your way through the still dim and damp streets of London, past the huddled and wretched people sleeping rough on your way to work, you won't drop a single coin in their upturned caps and tattered Pret coffee cups, all the while running through again and again in your head that your reason not to stump up so much as a pence is sound and above suspicion, although deep down where you buried and promptly forgotten all about it will be a part of you that doesn't believe a word of what you're rehearsing, that if you were for a moment to listen to that muffled voice inside your head, you'd have to concede that you holding this principle is actually a way for you to avoid having to face the mess you're in, because, in truth, it isn't by choice little less by chance that you've wound up right this moment sitting in this train, for if you mean to support yourself and afford the prohibitively expensive rent for the box in which you sleep, eat and dry your washing, a tiny room inside an apartment which you incommodiously share with an ever-rotating cast of mostly insufferable 

flatmates * at the very rim of zone 3 , then you have to resign yourself to boarding the 6:15 train every morning to get to work all the way in zone 1 on time, a second job which combined with your first brings barely enough to support you to cover your monthly travel costs and student debt repayments, little less the medication prescribed by your doctor, indeed you're so literally strapped for cash and up to your eyeballs in debt that frequently there are periods like now when you have to stretch a month's course over two, even three months, medication you feel you so desperately need to help you find relief from the acute anxiety you feel hopelessly trapped in by ever-growing job insecurity and the constant, escalating pressure to succeed, and when you don't, that is, when you don't succeed, which is to say all too-often, medication to help numb the consequent overwhelming, almost suffocating pressure that keeps you in a state of never-ending anxiety to go online and simulate success by portraying your actually existing life's unflinching tedium and chronic mediocrity, its grinding defeats and humiliations into a veritable, unmitigated parade of enviable achievements instead, all of which is to say, when most people say they can't afford to donate, you just know they're exaggerating, but how in your case it's literally true, and since a truth like that isn't something that just sits there and reassures you, and since all the evidence declares that your situation won't change anytime soon, and since it weighs heavily on you and serves only to inspire you whenever you think too much about it to tumble into that gruesome sensation of powerlessness, then why not banish the thought that in your life you no longer feel you have the ability to set your own course by conjuring up instead that abstract ethical principle to delude yourself into thinking that you do, indeed, have a choice in the matter at hand, for as long as you have the principle to occupy your thoughts, to lend you the dim impression of something vaguely resembling volition by allowing you to choose not to donate out of ethical concern, you won't have to then endure the confusion and distress that admitting your impotence would otherwise cause you to feel, because it would simply be too devastating for you to have to confront those photographs every morning on the train to work, for all it would accomplish in the end would be to cause you to turn your head away and groan, and stare at the floor in apprehension as if the solution to all your problems were somehow waiting for you there, and feel even more anxious and mentally anguished than what you already felt this morning when standing at the platform's edge.

 

_______________________________________

 

  

* A decade of flat sharing has taught you to vehemently dislike this word. Indeed, you've taken the habit whenever leaving a flat-related message on the kitchen's chalkboard of interposing scare quotations when spelling the word, i.e.: Morning Flat"mates", before heading to work this morning I really couldn't help but notice...

Patterns (Parentless, Deafblind and Brain Injured) 

 

Patterns (Stoned, Fearful and Homeless) 

 

 

 

Patterns (Cancerous, in Decline and Genitally Mutilated) 

 

 

Patterns (Abused, Cancerous and Schizophrenic) 

 

 

Patterns (Freezing, Homeless and Malnourished) 

 

 

 

Patterns

 

 

2014 – ...

 

60 x 60 x 3 cm each 

 

Three charity fundraising posters reclaimed from British trains,

cut and woven with one another into a medium triaxial weave,

mounted on clear acrylic wall support

Freezing, Homeless and Malnourished

Abused, Cancerous and Schizophrenic

Stoned, Fearful and Homeless

Cancerous, in Decline and Genitally Mutilated

Parentless, Deafblind and Brain Injured

 

Patterns   

 

 

2014 – ...

 

 

67 x 63 cm

 

Charity fundraising posters publicising various humanitarian and animal welfare causes, reclaimed from British trains, cut and woven with one another into a medium triaxial weave

 

Freezing, Homeless and Malnourished​

Abused, Cancerous and Schizophrenic

Cancerous, in Decline

and Genitally Mutilated 

Parentless, Deafblind and Brain Injured

 

P a t t e r n s   

 

2014–...

 

67 x 63 cm

 

Charity fundraising posters publicising various humanitarian and animal welfare causes, reclaimed from British trains, cut and woven with one another into a medium triaxial weave, one of the strongest known to humanity at this time.

 

Stoned, Fearful and Homeless