dominique cameron RSW

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.

Bottom of Leith walk, looking down Great Junction street. Mixed media on paper.

 

‘Up the Junction’ cafe. The waitress, new to the job, smiles at me. A young red haired girl comes out of a shop cradling half a dozen eggs in her hands, singing as she crosses the road. Donald Trump on the radio, customers murmur. Steaming plates of sausages and mash. The cafe owner doodles on his order pad. Outside the smell of mens’ cologne mingles with diesel fumes and stale beer in the doorway of the Central Bar. A woman in her car, sits smoking a last cigarette before her shift starts. The city’s recycled glass piled high at the edge of the quay. Gulls sit, picking amongst the shards, fragments of music pitching, falling, twinkling in the sun.

Mixed media on paper – 42 cm x 46 cm.

Charlie Marr, picture framer, Leith. The shop – fluorescent tubes light the archive of forty years of scoring, cutting, nailing, stapling, glueing, fixing, stringing. Frames hang from the ceiling, row upon row of windows waiting to be filled with a pastel portrait of a first world war soldier, a photograph of a loved one. Landscapes you painted of a favourite view, the place where you fell for her, where you forgot to bring the flask of tea, again; to be mounted and boxed and glazed to keep the dust and the dirt away from what time does to paper and our memories.