Sy's Prints (& Stuff): August 2015

Monday, 24 August 2015

SOUL /searching>

I've been spending a lot of time alone lately, wandering around, finding new places, lakes, and mosques, churches and crypts and libraries, I been appreciating small details, talking to strangers, thinking through things, trying to figure stuff out, trying to forget and remember stuff, a lot of stuff.... I don't know...

I have this strange feeling I won't be living london much longer, (am not sure if that's living london the project or living london in this city, or my general scatty lifestyle, I don't know....) but trying to focus on the present..... because that's all we have. that is ALL we have: nothing more, and I keep telling myself sy, don't sweat the small stuff. shit, it's ALL small stuff. Well most of it. And the present is yours to make the best out of, I'd like to try to make the best out of now///-

St Leonard's Church and Crypt

South Bank Mosaics- a secret world

Luke makes mosaics :-)

here's malcolm X and malala

....and the priest showed me the way, he led me to a staircase and said, just follow the mosaics, and so I said thank and I travelled down the stairs and through the labyrinthine passages of the crypt of St John’s church, passing so many mosaics as I went, mosaics depicting Malcolm X and Malala, and Che Guevara, until I finally reached a room on which there was a paper stuck to the door, it read ‘Southbank Mosaics’ and so I knocked on the door and stuck my head in. Inside there were a handful of dissimilar looking people making mosaics. I asked if Paula was about, but she wasn’t, and I said I just wanted to have a look really, and a kind young apprentice named Luke offered to show me around...

...he showed me around the pottery workshop, and told me stories of young offenders creating the most interesting mosaics, and he told me about the self-professed baroness, and that they would all come together to make mosaics, people of all ages and backgrounds and histories, all creating and I told him a mosaic artist I once knew said for her it was all about making something beautiful out of the broken, he agreed and told me 300 people created the Queenhithe mosaic together, but because of cuts to funding, things were slowing down...

...and he said one of the Blake mosaics had been stolen, a white woman in a blue dress, and so instead of replicating it they decided to change it up a bit, and made the woman asian instead.... and we talked about mudlarking too, and the connection between mudlarking and mosaics, and I told him about the artist I had just met in Greenwich who would make glass fish from pieces of glass she found in the river.... and how she had an exhibition of things she had collected and created and found, and then after a while I left, and later I found myself by some Charlie Chaplin mosaics created by those in the crypt, on an anonymous road- those ethereal connections... each proceeding another....