The Cracktown Tour Diaries; Week 2 – “A Tale of Knife Crime and Dead Crickets”

2nd February 2009

The week before the exhibition at Greyfriars Art Space, and I’m panicking. Not about the show, in and of itself (I’m not nervous in that respect at all – not sure why). No, I’m actually panicking about the bloody dead insects I need to create the gallery window display. It is nigh on impossible to buy dead houseflies from the net. Ebay, once rumoured to sell them in abundance, is currently bereft of deceased insects, and I’m googling wildly with just days to go. I’ve found one place in America that sells small cans of flies for around £7.00 a pop (+ p&p). No good; I need a lot and I need ‘em NOW.

Scouted round King’s Lynn and found one pet shop that sells whole dead crickets in cans. I’ll have to go with that. Three cans of these damned insects duly purchased.

The Lynn News conducted a telephone interview with me today. The interviewer was very pleasant, but I felt that she wanted me to admit to seeing knife attacks in town. A bizarre situation then occurred when I began rattling off all the violence I’ve personally witnessed ‘on the street’, but NO knifings; “throttling, kicking, punching, gouging, pushing, shoving, cake baking, spitting, generally aggressive physical intimidation, and so on. The more alert readers amongst you would have spotten a deliberate gag in that list of woe; ‘tis true, I’ve never witnessed anyone spitting on each other.

I sent The Lynn News some hi-res shots of my work for the article, as requested, but they decided to pull the low-res jpeg of ‘Synaesthesia’ from my site and print that instead. That work seems to attract more attention than most of the other works of the series combined (even though I admittedly play upon that by prominently using it in my promo material). Strange. But fine. Though I hope it is not my ‘…Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.’

That is to come.

PB.

[Lynn News article; 30th Jan 2009]