From the pages of my notebooks - Ideas that got the chop.

A short story following a teenager in Argentina. He works for pocket money at a local old folks’ home for elderly Germans. The home is in a large barricaded enclosure. The Germans are so old they were confined to their wheelchairs even when the boy’s father earned his pocket money there. The boy has a friend who is undergoing a sex change, he steals this other boy’s medicine and feeds it to a German. These he has realised are old Nazis – people who had used others and are now to be used themselves just for fun.

There is an architectural theory that buildings are built to last in times of upheaval, in more prosperous times the aim is to build big and fast.
Around here the facades are crumbling as the world re-adjusts.

…but this was Dublin in the 1980s. It wasn’t strictly a recession. It just was.

I went to school through streets filled with gaps but my mind was far away.

These were intended for Wicklow County Arts Office. They went with the nicest one anyway.

Dublin is full of empty retail spaces. As was the fashion, they all have full glass fronts and no letterbox provision. A gap was left under doors for the postman to slide mail in.
It would be great to slide in a flat packed object that could be raised inside, just as they do with ships in bottles. Maybe something organic like seeds in a planter. Maybe a boat. Maybe fill the room with a huge balloon. Or maybe file charcoal dust into the space and blow it in.
I never have the time to do these things. But art is ideas and these are mine.
Edit June First 2010: I’m glad this was an unused idea – it seems someone else had the same idea, but they saw it through.

My phone did this when I wasn’t looking