Six Weeks In:
I have been in the cooler over 6 weeks now and have not finished the 2nd mosaic yet. I haven’t been too intense about it and taken thing things quite slowly. I am still enjoying making it and it looks like each one will take me about a month at this rate.
I have had to stop now as it got to me physically. Leaning over to reach something slightly beyond reach, has made my knees hurt. Standing with your center of gravity not above your knees like the guy on stage with magnets in his shoes to enable hime to lean over without falling over is how I have been working. I think I will sit cross legged like a pixie on the table when I get back.
I have done two foxes which I really enjoyed doing and kept two back for later otherwise I would have done all the good bits too early and it would be tedious till the end. So I am keeping 2 of them back to enjoy.
The Trickster and cunning is the symbology associated with the fox (like the wolf) and stories of foxes are well established in folklore. One of my foxes is a serious fox who is the protector of all foxes.
When I looked back this morning at the photos I took on my initial site visit, I was surprised to find one of them was of a fox which had been run over by a car right at the site entrance to this development. This busy road A41 has been the central issue to the way this commission has unfolded. These mosaics were designed for a very different context (a ‘shared space’, where people and vehicles are equal as is common in Holland and some places in the UK Ashford in Kent being one). Sadly this development will not be one of them and my designs for the ‘shared space’ have not been implemented. The motorist has won and my designs for the ‘new vision’ I thought I was contributing to and wanted so much to champion has been waved aside by the city council.
Somehow the Fox has presented itself to me as a symbol of how the natural world has been moved aside for ‘progress’, and the pedestrian coming 2nd to cars and convieniance again. This again brings me to the views and writings of Joseph Beuys.
My Fox is guarding his domain and you will have to get up early in the morning if your are going to take it off him.
