Archive for August, 2009
Lu Xun Park (Guest spot)
Posted by megan in chalk, guest spots on August 25th, 2009
Today’s guest spotter is Jeff Stewart – author, artist and sometime bread-seller at his local Sunday market
I love Lu Xun Park. It’s in Hongkou, Shanghai, and is my most favourite place on earth at the moment. Everything happens here – there is dance, tai chi, singing, talking, and sitting. Lovely, to me, and I can’t even speak Chinese.
People also write on the footpath there in water or chalk. They often write poetry, advertise their calligraphy skills, or quote common Chinese sayings. In the first photograph the man is writing characters in outline, which is very difficult.
Sometimes migrant workers write their story on the ground asking for help. They come to the city from rural areas and often have trouble finding work. The second photograph was taken after rain had blurred a woman’s story about her current living situation.
Jeff’s photograph of a man writing on the pavement in water accompanies his journal entry Translating Lu Xun Park on the Kai Xin (Happy Heart)website
No war
At Federation Square in Melbourne Nearamnew is a public artwork that incorporates the cobblestone paving. According to the Federation Square website, it is a vast paving design with poetic text inscriptions where fragmented voices of historical and fictional characters can be deciphered in nine locations around the site.
In 2005 I found that a contemporary character had added an inscription to another location on the cobbles. I don’t know how long it had been there. Australia joined the war in Iraq in 2003.
Tomb darers
Some people take huge risks to put their tags up (or, in this case, down). And some people also take big risks to get a photo. These two examples are on the Warringah Freeway near Naremburn. It’s late afternoon and most of the traffic is heading north away from the city. But in the mornings the volume of traffic over these tags is enormous. So they have an audience of thousands – if anyone actually notices them. What’s amazing is how long they’ve lasted without being worn away. The photograph was taken in May and they are still there three months later.
Neural pathway (Guest spot)
Posted by megan in chalk, guest spots, mysteries on August 1st, 2009
Canberra writer Doug Fry is Pavement Graffiti’s inaugural guest spotter.
Apart from a failed first year university class (and my weekly trash TV fix of Bones) I don’t really have any experience in the field of psychology, so I’m only making a vaguely educated guess when I say that the author/illustrator of this work is probably a paranoid schizophrenic.
The author/illustrator is a gentleman who appears to be in his early 40s, and his chaotic ‘thought pattern’-type works can occasionally be spotted on public surfaces – bus shelters, powerline poles, shopping centre walls – around the inner southern suburbs of Canberra. This particular work was done on the footpath along Macgregor Street in Deakin, not far from the local shopping centre. 
I passed the gentleman in the middle of sketching this particular ‘thought pattern’ during a stroll to fetch some groceries in December 2008. On my way home, he was sitting on a nearby bench, his work complete, so I stopped to chat with him – unsuccessfully. The gentleman immediately grew suspicious of my attention, muttered a few words, and then walked off in a hurry, leaving the mystery of his works intact.