On 21st August I decided to start keeping a register of my attendance up the tree. This is what it looks like so far:-
Leopard’s Log
I also wrote a draft press release:-
Press Release
From my notebook, dated 14th July 2013
The hot weather endures.
I endure
Saddle-sore discomfort,
grazed feet and ankles –
the results of my clumsiness when climbing.
Being overlooked (underlooked – Look Up! Look Up!) and then:
“Why is she up there, Mummy?”
Little girl bright in a yellow cardigan
with dark brown eyes.
“Why is she up there, Mummy?”
Mummy takes little girl by the hand, bends over her, low
Her voice is hushed –
Mummy probably doesn’t know, either.
A Weimaraner, my best visitor yet,
Jumping up to try and reach my toes and
Falling, rolling over on its back as it lands on the grass
Blue eyes turned up to me, perched on my bough
Its ears falling back
WHAT’S THAT???!!!
Unlike a squirrel, and unlike a cat.
I decide I really ought to have my camera at the ready, at all times.
Lying, crouching, lounging in a tree
Watching what passes below
…Is this how it feels to be a predator?
A leopard in the wild?
The safety of being up high
The anonymity of being unnoticed
The advantage of seeing, without being seen.
Watching. Waiting.
Invisibility gives one a certain sort of
Power (whether one wants it or not)
Yet I’m not trying to hide
I’m here, right above you, right behind you.
From notes made on 12/07/13
11/7/13
Later – afternoon.
“There has been quite a steady flow of human traffic. People blooming, people fading…
Hardly anyone saw me.
So is a piece of work ‘art’ if nobody notices it?”
… A load of typing, and subsequent deleting, later, I think: Ha! Why even ask that?! I hate existential questions, because (a) I don’t think there are right and wrong answers and (b) who cares, anyway?
Okay, so I’m currently involved in making some art that a lot of people walk past (or under) and don’t even notice.
I googled ‘unnoticed art’ and came across Isaac Cordal, whose work I saw at Urbis in Manchester some years ago. The work I saw was a wall of photographs, not his figures themselves. The photographs were like the ones on his website, pictures of his little concrete men. Whichever comprise the artwork – his worried little people, or his brilliant photographs of them -doesn’t matter, as far as I’m concerned.
Here’s a Guardian article about Cordal and another artist, Slinkachu, from 2011, if you’re interested:-
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/feb/27/mini-street-sculpture-cordal-slinkachu
And as for me, I am, for the most part, enjoying being a leopard in a magnolia tree.
