Perhaps just another graffiti strewn doorway but the phrase “Good Times = 2016 =” called out. I doubt that there are many people I know who would readily conflate 2016 and ‘good times’. So just a throwaway action with a spray can? irony? a small act of resistance?
Possibly it was just a coincidence but passed this doorway during the Edinburgh Festival. A time when the city opens its arms to the world in a celebration of all the performing arts, bringing together audiences and artists. Just walking the streets, soaking up the creative energy can bring sustenance. Good Times indeed.
And what about that figure on the bottom right?
Now playing: King Champion Sounds – To Awake in That Heaven of Freedom (Thanks to Teesside Psychogeography for altering me to this. Check out their excellent blog Smell of Water).
Passing, at speed, on a train through the three red diamonds of the Forth Rail Bridge. The eye drawn to the foreground. Shards of red-painted steel, morph and distort, through shifting prisms of wind-scattered raindrops. The Firth of Forth, a grey blanket folded at the horizon beneath a brightening sky.
These images were ‘found’ beneath a section of the M90 Motorway; an elevated brutalist behemoth straddling ancient agricultural land, north-east of Rosyth. The sheer mass of concrete overhead creates an almost cave like sensation when standing directly underneath. Folded into artificial darkness, violent white light spills around the concrete edifice, flooding the hinterland of perception. Looking out from the cocoon of the dark belly, steel giants stalk the landscape. Above, the dull thud-thud of unseen vehicles passing.
Imaginary maps of this hidden microclimate are revealed in the concrete structures and the very land itself.
Compared to the verdant vegetation in the surrounding fields, the dry earth fractures into mesmerising worlds of ambiguous scale.
Concrete surfaces leach vivid patinas of oxidising colour.
Time, heat, moisture and the elements create an ongoing cartography of chance.
River deltas, mountain ranges, lagoons, beaches, sandbanks.
Topographies of texture and shade, revealed in light.
Encounter with the red-billed shaman.
A gull-like creature invites us to contemplate
the white void of falling water.
Head bowed, long neck. Wise knowing eye.
When looking up, feels like looking down.
For an instant, on the roof, a city underneath the gaze of a drone.
Aura of the walls.
Frescoes painted by gravity.
The staining sound of concrete stigmata:
drip
drip
drip
Found Art – II
This is not an easy place to access on foot, although it is visible from the trains that pass along the Fife Circle railway line. The concrete supports are usually covered with graffiti but some recent activity has painted over all of this with white geometric shapes. It is unclear whether this is some clean up intervention by the authorities, or a Year Zero initiative from the graffiti community themselves.
Strangely, from across the tracks, tags still shout out for attention.
Emerging from the darkness, maps and imaginary worlds dissolve in sunlight as we head back west.
Across the fields, the lumbering concrete, traverses north and south.
The giant steel stilt-walkers are heading east.
≈≈≈
The original intention was to incorporate this material into another post that is presently being written on quite a different theme. As this particular encounter was the result of a serendipitous detour we have chosen to post it separately.
An earlier post, underneath a different section of the M90, can be found here.
Now playing: Kayo Dot – Dowsing Anemone with Copper Tongue.
Murdo Eason - From Hill to Sea 