Sidewalk Constellations

Walking round the ferry port of Toronto I noticed a generous dotting of gumspots on the ground. Perhaps it was because I'd been sharing memories of childhood space obsession with my friend, Glenn Gear (http://www.digipopo.org/content/glenn-gear), but quite suddenly those gumspots became constellations, all they needed were white lines joining them together to make them visible to everyone. I duly reached into my pocket and with a stick of chalk did some joining up. 

As a little girl I occasionally took the kitchen stool outside and sat looking into the night sky, trying to find constellations (or asterisms, but let's remain colloquial). The only ones  I ever identified were the Plough (or Dipper) and Orion (who has since become an old friend), and I think this was because of the Space Topic I did in Mrs. Cotton's class, during which we carefully pin-pricked a tracing of these two constellations in our exercise books. The rest I simply couldn't find, even with my planisphere (which I didn't know how to use, but  loved owning: it was a talisman, a symbol of all the things I might one day know) . After half an hour or less, I would slide off the stool and return it to the kitchen, feeling slightly defeated.

So all those years later, as I waited for a ferry to return me to Hanlan's Point, I began to make my own constellations on the asphalt, enjoying a private nostalgia. Regarding my handiwork I was struck but how credible they looked and how pretty and this is how the Sidewalk Constellations project began.

Initially, I was simply taken with the aesthetic of these whimsical drawings. I spent afternoons wandering quiet streets with a box of chalk playing this new game. It was only later it occurred to me that the groupings of the real stars are just as arbitrary, pure pareidolia. It is stories which give them meaning. The dirty blobs on the pavement are also embedded in narrative. A piece of gum is chewed for minutes or hours, it is moved around an area of the body which is, for most, the primary means of communicating. A mouth is an intimate, infinite space, like the magic cooking pot which can make a never ending amount of hot porridge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_Porridge), but instead of porridge it overflows with words and these are trying to communicate thoughts which are created in another intimate but inexplicable place, that is, a mind. Think about gum as being connected to these things and it gains  significance. Each gumspot has been part of someone's life and has been discarded on that person's journey. When several journeys cross, a sidewalk constellation is formed.

When I go to a town or city to do Sidewalk Constellations, I chat to a lot of people. Strangers on the streets I am chalking, in the cafes I rest and think  in, who I am staying with. I glean what I can about the place and its inhabitants and I think about it all as I join up gum. At some point I usually take myself for a long, solitary walk and talk to myself, felting together the info-lint until the stories are made, stories that make sense of the random events that brought those pieces of gum together. Sometimes the stories relate to the person who discarded the gum, sometimes to the shape a group makes; they can symbolise an event that happened in the community or to a lone person. Then I tell the stories in a public venue, record them and (usually) leave them in places I've chalked or met people.

Stories are important  for a community to understand, own and be enchanted with the place in which it lives and works. It is my intention with the Sidewalk Constellations project to create narratives which go some way to celebrate, record, archive and make accessible the contemporary mythologies and issues which exist in various urban communities and to do this in public space.

Eyelevel Gallery, Halifax, N.S

35 Days of Non-Organized Art

Sidewalk Constellations   |   21 May 2009

Stories: Bernie & George   |   Joe’s Kites

I came up with three stories after long and short conversations with Eryn Foster (now former director of Eyelevel and most gracious host), her friend Suzanne (Bloomfield Centre), Joe from Joe’s Store, Gottingen St., Megan and Joe (a  different Joe, this one) who invited me into their backyard for drinks after I walked past Megan sweeping gravel outside their house and then asked where I could find a beer and a patio (they’ll be opening a bar on Gottingen Street very soon, it’s going to be ace!) their friends, Laura and others whose name I regretfully forget, and with assistance from Halifax Central Library and The Anchor Archive.