With the anniversary of the referendum coming up I’ve eventually plucked myself out of the post degree show hole. I’ve been thinking about the make up of our society, business after business being shattered becoming a mere shadow in the street in favour of your nearest Tescos of corporate coffee company, foodbanks, an unnecessary reality as people live ‘below the breadline’, being given tinned food that they can’t heat up become they have no leccy, and promise after promise being broken. Are we returning to the dreaded Thatcherite era?
Zero hour contracts, minimum wage and being employed the day before the monthly cut off point is the reality of life after graduation. It is no wonder I have struggled to build up the balls to create new work. Students may be the revolution, but that’s because the majority of them, unless they are from an oppressed minority or an actual working class background, take the privileges of going from one form of education to the next foregranted, so they actually have the mentality to access what is wrong and focus on doing something about it from the comforts of the world of academia.
What makes up the reality of living in Scotland? Generally you have to be in a city to make a living, which takes me back to the days of my first year of art college, leaving village life for the first time at Telford in Edinburgh. I stayed in a housing estate in the North and walked past a bin that had been set on fire on my way to college everyday, it totally fascinated me. As profound as it may be that to me, is what symbolises city life: mass consumption and the necessity to destroy it in order to create balance.
I also remember being told about the holes that are on buildings, a scam from Thatcher days to support houses that actually don’t do anything other than look like bullet holes.
These ramblings are the beginnings of something, its nice to feel inspired again, by burnt bins and bullet holes.
