’20 years from now I’ll make it, somehow’ was made in late 2007, and was quite a blatant showcase of all my anxieties about what humanity faces in the 21st century. Nearly 4 years on, we are still on the same track towards a right old mess. We still don’t have enough time in the day to Analyse (like Thom Yorke said on his 2007 album Eraser) where we are, where we want to be, and what we can do to change where we’re going. The demands of modern life keep intensifying, now that our privacy can be gatecrashed at any moment by the ever-forward march of techno-gadgets that dominate our lives and now that the recession and government spending cuts mean that taking life one step at a time is what is necessary rather than thinking about the future. Sometimes I reckon my works work better as wake up calls outside the gallery walls and rather than inside them (where we are in the cotton wool-ness of our evening dress and the red wine we are given).
I decided to leave this piece in the waiting room at Sheffield Train Station; now there’s only the fast train stoppage point of Meadowhall shopping centre on the Hallam line which hasn’t received one of my works so far (I think the likes of me, would be monitored by the cameras as being ‘suspicious’ as soon as I set floor towards this complex – not that this is a particularity suspicious thing I’m doing, but we do live in an insane and paranoid world).
I really couldn’t think of anywhere where I’d have the time to hang this drawing up, but as soon as I started covering it up in newspaper (to avoid the usual comments I get on public transport when carrying a work around) I quite liked the idea of it being wrapped up. After all, they are gifts, sort of, as I know that I’m not going to get them back.
John B Ledger 