Floating a not very scary remote controlled shark around an independent bargain store to the amusement of shoppers.

Everybody at GMRC is involved in navigating systems in order to reach their goals.
As a member of management, the participant traverses the bridge between the staff of the centre and the seemingly remote corporate and estates staff.  Tasks can take on surprisingly extenuated form. It takes a certain grace, patience and possibly gallows humour to experience this unscathed.
I was struck by the participant’s sense of humour and his ability to keep such things in proportion, or to bring them back down to size with humanity.
This manifesto allowed me to reference humour and its mechanisms for subversion and resilience.

Piece made by me during a workshop at artist Roddy Buchanan’s 2014 residency at the Edinburgh Art Festival, Charlotte Square Edinburgh. Pouring water into the headlamps of executive high performance cars to make them look as if they were crying.

Charlotte Square

Intervention in a National Treasure was born out of my genuine fondness for John Lewis Department Stores. Much as I love wandering the sweetly scented halls of John Lewis, enjoying the best of British design and all the pretty ladies, I don’t always feels solid enough to take it on. It is as if, offered such a positive and robustly constructed identity or life branding, my own identity sometimes rises up to meet it, and at othertimes ducks into a shadow. There might be days when I am feeling ‘John Lewis’ and other wobbly days when I am ‘not feeling very John Lewis’. Outward appearances not necessarily being a reliable indicator of inner resilience I found it hard to spot fellow ‘NVJLs’ and so decided to make a space in the store for a bit of self doubt or identity gear change. I mocked up price tags with phrases that might represent a hiatus in one’s personal narration and slotted them into the shelves in an act of reverse shoplifting.