Year 2306 - Dean Reddick - Small World Futures

Dean Reddick, #unsettledgallery No.4

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.

Dean Reddick

Today we discover the Small World Future of.... Dean Reddick

Song collector
Year 2306

Unsurprisingly I came across this song on the east coast. There are many versions, some relating to Holbeach, Burnham and Yarmouth. Some people sing "pray" instead of "stand" in the chorus, or even "praying" instead of "waiting" which is clearly illogical. A melancholy melody, mothers sing it to their babes minus the last verse and I even watched a teenaged girl singing it to her spotty beau. Bizarrely the song has also been adopted by children as a skipping game, with the emphasis on shouting "Clang! Clang! Clang!" to imitate the dead bells as they come back to life, and zombie walking.

Chorus: All rang the bells at Romney shore
In vain above the ocean's roar,
And now we stand here, waiting for
The Romney bells to ring once more.

Verse: My dead love lies upon the beach.
There was no better man than he.
Now all my hopes sink out of reach:
I watch his warmth and colour leach
Into the sands of New Romney.

Chorus: All rang the bells etc

Verse: My dead ma comes to me in dreams,
Her image floating in the sea
Immortalised in gifs and memes.
But still no peace for her it seems
Beyond the sands of New Romney

Chorus: All rang the bells etc

Verse: My dead nan's voice comes on the phone
Each week she used to speak to me,
“Love, death is cold, I hate to moan,
But I am chilled unto the bone
Upon the sands of New Romney.”

Chorus: All rang the bells etc

Verse: My dead child took my last belief.
No more a mother, no more me,
But barren as a blasted reef.
Truly lonely, only grief
Upon the sands at New Romney.

Chorus

Natalie Low

Dean Reddick

You can find Dean Reddick's Small World Future on top of the orange dispenser on Snowsfields, London Bridge, UK, #unsettledgallery No.4. If you can find it then you can take it home, or perhaps you will leave it for someone else to discover.

Dean Reddick is an artist, an art therapist and a lecturer. He uses a range of media and enjoys experimenting with casting processes using plaster, metal and resin to explore the tensions between organic and geometric forms, positive and negative space and the distortions that occur in producing casts. As an artist and art therapist Reddick has a keen interest in the role of art as a cultural phenomenon and as a container for inter-personal meaning. He enjoys working collaboratively and has been a regular exhibitor at Walthamstow's E17 Art Trail as well as exhibiting with CollectConnect. Recently he published Art Therapy in the Early Years: Therapeutic Interventions with Infants, Toddlers and Their Families (pub. 2016, Routledge) alongside co-editor Julia Meyerowitz-Katz.

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).