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Mixed media on paper 42cm x 30cm.

Mixed media on paper – 102cm x 78cm

 

Snow sky blooms. Vast clouds of darkest grey. At the Albert docks a man appears at my left shoulder. His glasses are spattered with sleet as he looks up at the cranes.’Do you know what the name of the middle crane is ?’  ‘Its a level luffer’. He goes on to tell me he used to work for the company that made them in Carlisle and explains their engineering principle. He talks about how after the war you could visit the warships and submarines docked here and how the quaysides were chocked full of cargo and stevedores. Does that job still exist, or even the word ? Perhaps it has slipped quietly away with the level luffer, archived in an underground climate controlled library beneath the permafrost. The man in the gabardine coat takes his leave, happy to have passed on the naming and explanation of a crane. The snow doesn’t come to Leith, but maybe up in the hills it is falling, drifting over our hidden repository of lost things.

 

 

Mixed media on paper .

Cold. Rowan trees scatter red confetti on passers by. Lost gloves and lonely hats placed on window sills. Betty tells me her uncle had been a hairdresser in Leith and was so small he had to stand on an orange box to cut hair. Newspaper clippings on the wall of the cafe. Mince and tatties and mushy peas. How cold is it ? Very, but not enough to turn on the heating. A young woman shouts ….’Why is everything shit ?’. Stockings wrinkle below the knee. Two soft fried eggs. She’ll make herself a hot water bottle when she gets in. She squeezes herself at the thought and smiles. Outside the day moves on quietly, trying to see the best in it.

Leith docks. Mixed media on paper 84 cm x 54 cm

Sketch, ink on paper.

I watch the trailer for ‘Trainspotting 2’ with a pal before heading down to Leith. Flapping blue and white police tape cordons off a red Fiesta wrapped around a lamp post. Helicopter seeds from an ash tree, green, yellow carpet the path. A bag of rice thrown into the cold easterly wind blows down Duke Street, sends pigeons into a fury. I draw the street. A man sits down next to me. He places a bottle of vodka and half a large bottle of coke with precision at his feet. He contemplates them both for a moment and then, leaning forward he empties the vodka into the coke. He tells me how its illegal to drink alcohol in public, this way its ok. He has just come from a job interview; he wasn’t optimistic. Grey graphite, grey pigeons, grey Edinburgh. The pigeons take off, circling the pedestrian precinct and land on Queen Victoria’s head. I go to get warm in the library, finding a quiet spot in the graphic novels section. I hear women’s voices reading to children who giggle and yawn and fidget, listening to stories of bravery and love.

The camera moves, looking for the edges of place, watches an archive of intimacies. Stories, furtive, hasty, violent, gentle, abandoned as the wind retrieves and curates the objects of the forgotten. Pizza boxes, lager cans, discarded clothing, car parts, condoms, a Chinese takeaway menu, looked at by someone, somewhere on the other side of the city, settling in for the night shift.

Mixed media on paper 85 cm x 40 cm.

“……For me, a storyteller is like a passeur who gets contraband across a frontier”. John Berger.