SFVFS

Imagine Leake Street on a busy Saturday afternoon. Cascades of artists arriving and claiming wall spaces for the day; tourists and locals walking among them, watching with quiet excitement. The first SEED of potential is placed. Its origin: hundreds of days of creative expression before it, the same finite space expressed in infinite ways. The artists compelled to create, those watching compelled to bear witness. Once the space has been chosen the first mark is made, the first FORM appears, and something that was dream begins to become reality. The murals and artworks emerge. Then comes the moment when the dream fully becomes the reality,  that strange click in the artist's mind that says, "I am done" , the VOID. And then, almost immediately, the release from completion: the second FORM, where the artist stands back from what is created and those watching compliment (or not!). Then the artist makes the decision to leave, to let go, to relinquish, to return the wall to Leake Street. Sometimes they resist and hold on, but always they leave. The wall is consumed and becomes the second SEED, and the helix process moves on to the new first SEED, one rotation forward. 

SEED/FORM/VOID/FORM/SEED

This is what I have come to understand as the creative process: helix in structure, asymmetric in intention.

MIND THE MAP was a project born from this realisation. Leake Street taught me that the best way to create asymmetry, imperfection, is collaboration. It is the quickest route to evolution. Elements, resources, instruments, whatever the manifestation of input, combine to create a new tension, which is then fed back into the helix. Another rotation. Simply add one to another and get a third. Or, in its deliberately provocative form: 1+1=3, rinse and repeat. By combining my late father's resource of a mass of unused maps with my own creative expression, I asked 55 artists to work on two maps each, one I started and they finished, one they started and I finished. The simple rule: destroy, complement, or destroy and complement. 110 new helixes appeared, and their rotation journeys commenced. The helix: finite space, unchanging shape. The expressions within it: infinite.

Leake Street is a testament to this ideal. The spaces defined as walls merge into each other. The hierarchy of status dissolves as zero curation invites chaos into order. The order maintains the shape. The more I looked, the more I saw the structure, and the more I saw the structure, the more I realised I was inside it. A tunnel carved out by the helix, with infinite helixes branching out around it. The perfection of symmetry, the blank canvas, playing host to the asymmetry of chaos upon it. With MIND THE MAP, the map is the helix; what is expressed on it, endless. You can check out the MIND THE MAP exhibition to see the results, and feel free to browse the MIND THE MAP shop if the helix creation speaks to you.