Back on Track...

Taking a break from the football, at least after bringing the processing of the Bob Gough drawing to a close during the morning (& not counting the reading of 'Tor!’, Ulrich Hesse-Lichtenberger's illuminating history of the game & its development in Germany), yesterday afternoon offered the opportunity for another pedestrian journey along the double black lined routes of the old, pre-relocation stamping grounds, & thus, with a certain inevitability, the accompanying finding besides &/or upon examples of discarded & subsequently inadvertently flattened aluminium can ‘roadkill’.

In the interests of the continuation of the visual documentary project recording such findings for posterity & also with the intention, still, that they might one day provide the source images for a substantial development into drawing &/or painting, photographs were duly taken of what proved to be not the anticipated one or two finds of ‘roadkill’ but an incredible eight instances to be found along a relatively few yards of the course of the same stretch of corrective road markings, with the evidence (re)presented below.

The usual & once-familiar features of the various scenes can be observed in place: the modernist monochrome of the textured tarmac road surface with those horizontally-traversing ‘zips’ of the closely-hued & -toned pair of parallel lines laid over the original, erroneously applied double yellow lines of paint (in fact, the topmost lines present a second layer of ‘black’, the various, separate layers visible in ‘archaeological’ traces in places where surface deterioration & erosion has occurred) & of course the still life objects of the cans flattened onto the road surface & embedded into the picture plane as photographically framed.

Note too how some of the cans’ painted, branded surfaces have been subject to wear & tear & rusting, presenting a closer visual analogy to the abraded ‘double black lines’, & also the presence of fallen yellow blossom eddying around or nearby some of the cans, very close in colour to the visible yellow of the original lines, another visual echo, & somewhat poignant too in its discarded nature.