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| Wayne Sleeth, Little Library, Gibbon's Rent, #unsettledgallery No.6 |
Small World Futures is a collection of 38 miniature sculptures
depicting what life could look like in years to come. Each of these
small artworks will be placed in public spaces (#unsettledgallery)
around London Bridge. Every day throughout February we will be
featuring one of these worlds here on the website. A writer will also
use the world as inspiration to create something new and fresh, their
words describing the shape of a new world.
Today we discover the Small World Future of.... Wayne Sleeth
Year 2019
I met a man who could make something out of
nothing.
"Like an alchemist!" (Except none of them
succeeded.)
"Like a wizard!" (Except they're not
real.)
"Like a magician!" (Except the songbird is in
reality squashed flat beneath the false floor of the cage.)
And
then he was speeding away, ahead of me, out the door.
What I
loved about him was his positivity, his self-belief, his happy-face
and his vigorous sexual energy. And all the champagne bars he took me
to. And the dresses from Jones.
On the day he came home early,
I knew something bad was on its way because that morning he dropped a
penny on the carpet. He'd never lost money ever before. I picked it
up and turned it in my hand. It had been so long since I'd seen one,
I almost thought they'd been abolished.
He appeared with his
box of belongings, six hours before he would usually arrive
home.
"It's all gone," he
said.
"It?"
"Everything."
"Everything?"
"There's
nothing left."
"Nothing?"
We sometimes had
trouble communicating.
"There's less than nothing left,"
he said. And that suddenly did seem more serious.
"Are we
poor?" I asked.
"We are destitute," he said. I
should have known we couldn't just be poor.
"We'll have
to cash it all in - the house, the other houses, the cars, the
holidays, the pets, the children..."
"Not the children,"
I said.
"We'll have to tighten our belts," he
said.
"And roll up our sleeves," I added but he did not
seem to think this was helpful.
"I'll have to offload
everything - the shares, the phones, the watches, the
phablet..."
"Okay stop," I said. I got the gist and
I liked him better when he was positive.
"You have me,"
I said.
He laughed. "You don't own people."
This was
news to me.
"Well you have this," I said and held
the penny out.
He took it from me. He sat down on the floor.
He rolled it on the ground. He polished it between his index finger
and thumb. He tapped it against his lip and then his teeth. He
flipped it in the air. It came up heads.
"Okay," he
said, getting up, "I know what to do now."
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| Wayne Sleeth |
You can find Wayne's Small World Future tucked into the Little Library in Gibbon's Rent at #unsettledgallery No.6. If you can find it then you can
take it home, or perhaps you will leave it for someone else to
discover.
In his mature work since moving to the Lorraine region of France
in 2001,
Wayne Sleeth reiterates and re-explores the source and
schema of his more formative sensations; the big skies above the flat
lands of both the Lincolnshire coast of his father and the polders of
maternal Flanders, where he also spent his childhood. The Lorraine
region for this confirmed European is not only geographically
strategic, but offers an echo of that very play of horizontality and
verticality where the artist draws freely on “l’espace” as he
knows and feels it, as far as the canvas edge…
http://www.waynesleeth.com/
Natalie Low enjoys putting words on paper and believes that
everyone has a book of some sort inside them. She lives in
Twickenham, UK with her rather charming family. She has published two
chapbooks Dementia (2015) and recently School Run (2017).
