
More than a decade ago things were slightly falling apart. My mother’s heart was starting to break, my extended family had, long since, started to to fracture, I had been estranged from many of my relatives for years and I resolved to try to do something about it.
Unfortunately, at that time, I was eyeballs deep in alcohol and I quickly discovered that not one person was remotely interested in what I had to say.
Social media was in it’s infancy and, to this day, is something I am wary of for my own mental health. The first time someone showed me ‘Twitter’, even was back then, my first thought was that this look liked mass schizophrenia in digital form, just waiting to happen.
“A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.”
Agent K, Men in Black (1997)
I tried to reach out to various relatives over email and got responses back that I didn’t understand; dismissals that made me angry, unsolicited advice that I didn’t want need or ask for from people I hadn’t seen in years who seemed convinced of how well they knew me. I fired off reposts that I thought were undeniable and in return received nothing but rebuke.
Finally I found out how they saw me; a petty, jealous, paranoid, delusional, cartoon version of myself where, in my absence, the group had decided for me how I think and what I feel. It all made sense, if I really was this pantomime villain I was purported to be, I wouldn’t listen to me either!
Detail images from Alcoholiary
For some time I still wrote furious tomes and impassioned pleas but had enough self awareness to not send them. I would come home from work, have dinner and devote an hour or two before bed to a few cans of beer and a furious typing session, venting my frustrations, lamenting my vicissitudes and, instead of sending them, just saving them in a folder called, “Confessions of an Alcohol Eater.”
Years later I found this folder and found myself ashamed that I had not been able bring my mother some of the peace she deserved before she died, not least because of my own fallibilities. There is small comfort in reminding myself that I can only be responsible for my own words and actions.
This artwork contains excerpts from the writings from all those years ago. Any reference to any other person has been redacted. It is intended as an act of peace; a reflection on how, at the time of their conception, these sentences first left my mind rampant with unbridled nocturnal emotion only to be rendered ineffectual by sunrise, languishing impotent on an old hard drive for years.
It is also meant to serve as a cautionary tale to the observer. Now that social media is ubiquitous throughout modern society, this tool first brought to us with promises of bringing us all together like never before has certainly achieved that, just not in the way we thought it would.
A simple question, are there any posts or messages you have sent five or ten years ago that haven’t held up so well? Probably, right? Is there anything you might write tomorrow that five or ten years from now might not hold up too well? Probably, right?
Exhibition Piece
This piece is intended to be exhibited as an three dimensional installation. The image itself consists of 100 A4 sheets of text scanned into one file, ten on the horizontal axis and ten on the vertical. The print is fixed to a lightweight cylindrical metal frame and, depending on the exhibition space, can either be free standing or suspended like a lantern, taking the form of a candle or a temporary totem pole. To help visualise what this might look like, simply take a standard sheet of A4 paper, roll it into a tube and imagine it ten times bigger at just under three metres high.
