Flowers
The city is a dense text. The gaze of the eye can become a viewfinder, seeking, framing and capturing moments, crystallising them into memory. Or it can become a wary lookout, checking for beasts lit by luminous sodium lamplight.
You start to notice things: stories, moments, and arguments playing out each day and weaving themselves into the history and text of the city.
They come in many forms. Painted letters and symbols on the pavement or across shop shutters. The carved J <3 C on a tree. In the derelict house plot, the weeds and wild flowers. Entwining themselves up through fragments of old building, a peppering of vivid colour like paint flecks and splats against the earthy slabs and rotten wooden beams.
In the dislocated drainpipe feeding the vivid green blossom of moss, in the patchwork quilt of greys, jet blacks and steely blues that make up the side of the road.
Sometimes the most personal and emotionally-loaded experience, and yet also something of an ‘everycity’ remains in the form of a single flower, leant with care against a brick in the street.
