Things I Can't Help But Notice
Things I Can't Help But Notice
I've been thinking about waiting lately. Not in a grand, philosophical way — though it tends to get there eventually — but in the small, daily way. Last week I walked past a car that had mounted a grass verge and flattened a parking sign. The sign said permit holders only. I took a photo and posted it with the caption "You can't park there." Someone pointed out, quite rightly, that they did, not realising the cultural phenomenon of the phrase.
Around the same time, I spotted an Amazon van apparently stranded at sea online — a delivery driver's ambition outpacing the tide? I posted it with the caption "Still waiting for my delivery." It got a few likes from people who, I suspect, have also spent a Thursday afternoon refreshing a tracking page or waiting in forlornly. Or worse, finding the packages soaking wet by the bins.
These are the kinds of things an artist (or neurodivergent) can't help noticing. The world is constantly staging little dramas — small acts of defiance against signs, systems, and schedules — and once you start seeing them, it's hard to stop. I'm not sure whether making art teaches you to notice, or whether noticing is what makes you want to make art in the first place. Probably both.
The fisherman drawing I showed at the Bath Spa University show last October was called Waiting. It shows a few small figures, lines extended into empty space. Fishermen are, in many ways, professional waiters. The cast line is an act of faith — you've done what you can, and now you just have to be still. I find that compelling. The patience of it. The ability to stay still with seemingly little dopamine influx.
At a different show, I exhibited an interactive piece — stones gathered from a Cornish coast, wired up and connected to a small electronic instrument, created with Emma Davies. Touch two at once and the stylophone plays a sound. The piece is about connection and conductivity: the idea that ordinary, overlooked things contain something that can only be activated in relationship with something else. A stone isn't much on its own. Neither is a hand. But put them together, and something magical happens.
I think the humorous posts are about the same impulse, really. Noticing is a form of connection — between the person watching and the thing being watched, between the everyday world and the meaning it might be carrying without knowing it. The car on the grass. The van in the sea. They're not art. But they come from the same place the art comes from.
What have you noticed lately?
