Red on Blue (2026)

Cotton twine, Pencil and Watercolour on Canvas

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Red on Blue

1. red

Two people were in a coffee shop having a conversation about how long they thought they could live in a truck for a financial incentive that would increase to greater and greater significance based on the time spent living there. I wasn’t sure of the relationship between the two of them, looked too similar to be friends, leaning in too much to be siblings, not enough jewellery for it to be romantic. It was during the first rainy bit in the second half of the year, the before wintery bit where all the fun hypotheticals lose their inconsequentialness and start becoming about endurance. These questions usually play out in the same way: the question poser has thought a lot about their answer, and will give an exasperated response to the answer’s answer that will inevitably be far too small, or far too big. Sometimes I will deliberately answer something ridiculous to one of these questions to get a big response and try to stir that energy back into the conversation, ignite it. One time I got a text on these same lines from someone I was trying to impress and didn’t want to come across far too small or far too big just just right and I managed to workshop my response by asking both my fun friends and my sensible friends at the pub to gage the upper and lower boundaries of what a normal answer would be. The man in the coffee shop said 10 months. Ambitious, but not noteworthy enough to spark much discussion. They shimmied around that being about right and moved past it, reverting back to talking about the holidays they had been on. The final piece of the cut up cake that they were sharing continued sitting on the table. They put their coats on and didn’t acknowledge the cake, even in the goodbyes.

2. blue

Two weeks after the show ended I started sleeping in late again and stacking my thoughts in the evening instead. When I have a real focus the thoughts even themselves out and there is a constant engagement in the days and then when I don’t I muddle around a bit and only get very invested in the parts that need proper investment. I revert back to spending days in the dressing gown I have had for a long time where the tie has worn down and doesn’t go all the way around my whole body and just goes across the front. My Gran made it and it is blue and furry and has a very big hood keeping all the heat of your head close. Heat close heads close. Heads on shoulders on bus rides back home and later on too. When we get tired. Red in blue. Something comfortable.

Two weeks before the show started my local corner shop started stocking the good snack again. They are dry balls of spices and raisins coated in a batter, the total thing is about golf ball size. I bought a bag the first time and the second time I bought four bags because I always get through the first bag in a day and need to have back up bags as easily accessible options. Two weeks before the show started I had a big collection of things

Flyers

A speaker, but not a good one

Packing tape

My table

Frames

A moving van

Texts to send

A bottle of mince pie flavoured liquor that had fairy lights in a tree shape on the front

Bags of things to sell

A pencil to mark the wall

Picture hooks somewhere

All the things that you bring from the cupboards of one flat to the cupboards of another. Your helpful tools that become animated and irritating in the moving process and go back to doing nothing but slowly weighing on shelves. Not heavy or obstructing enough to be needed rid of. They age in an unseen way, not a visible one. The wear doesn’t damage the surface, it comes from the graphic design styles on the packaging going out of fashion, or changes in laptop charging port convention. My old front garden had a rusty pole that was too much a part of the furniture to remove. It aged differently, in a visible way. It was covered in the bubbling kind of rust where the orange is both adding volume to the sculpture and simultaneously burrowing under it, wearing against it, grating it down. It must have been something to lock a bike against, it was hip height and had a thick coating of black vinyl that had worn away at the top and the metal had been exposed for a long time. It was out next to the recycling bin and the spot where the family who lived upstairs would dump their worn things. A little landfill site able to settle thanks to the lack of a car in the drive. Grease stains but three dimensional. Achy in different ways. The recycling a collection of containers left when the contained had been used out; nothing of substance, only shells. The debris from upstairs taken from, but still just about wearing their contexts, mirrors with faint toothpaste stains, cracked plastic boxes that could fit under a bed. The pole doing nothing but sitting and wearing. Its purpose long obscured from its statue. And yet also not something immediately obtrusive enough to require it to be moved. Thinking about it now I try to move it. Try to animate something so static and unused that all it does is stand half mast and wear. It is a block without legs or wheels. It doesn’t stutter in wind. It creaks out when I want to think about it and the rust in my head’s picture gets more settled, less vibrant.