if you draw almost anything, set it free

 Remember this library book, about how to draw everything except women, that I fucked around so crossly and enjoyably with last year? Soon after I returned it the library billed me for damaging a book - fair - I didn't pay though, and switched instead to using Leonard's library card when I want to borrow books from there. Makes sense, really, he can be liable for late fines, which have just been reinstated after months and months of library-book limbo (they let us borrow at different times in lockdown, on a click and collect type system, but we have not been asked to return any till a few weeks ago). At this library they want to be paid fines in food rather than money, though, and the only food Len has exclusive rights of ownership over is the Lindt white chocolate in the pantry which he would prefer to die of library fines than be parted from or know that someone else was getting to eat it. Well, anyhow, when I would go to the library, I checked on the book and it was still in circulation, sometimes on the shelf and sometimes not, damage intact so to speak. I never knew though whether the additions were noticed by borrowers or what they made of them, if so, or whether anyone fed anything back to the library. The book just was there sometimes and other times not, clearly conducting its business without reporting back to me. This too is fair.

A couple of times in recent months, though, most recently just last night, I've heard back. Both times via the same grapevine, which is, essentially, our dear friend Ampersand Duck aka Caren Florance, a natural magnet and clearinghouse for everything that happens in Australia and probably the world in the realm of book arts intersecting with rebellion. A while back someone she knows posted a link on her FB of a post about the altered book in an inner-north FB group. The poster to the group had borrowed it from the library, and got it to the extent of apparently talking about it with her kids. Caren tagged me and I was of course thrilled no end. Someone in that group got in touch with me again yesterday to say they too had borrowed the book and had some fun talks about it with the family at home. I love everything about this and feel really quite grateful to the library for letting the book go on with its life in this way.

A couple of months ago, now that many of the old Shrine lifers have moved onto other things and people generally feel a bit freer to innovate in appropriate ways, I was encouraged by my really pretty great manager to actually do the artwork for a pre-Remembrance Day activity I'd been involved in generating conceptually. 

It is not in my job description to do this kind of thing but I certainly can do this kind of thing, and have been wanting to for a long time, so this was a really personally satisfying project purely as an emblem of a very good mutually supportive working relationship. I am so lucky to have this job, I know it. 

Well, the activity was to 'make and decorate' a messenger bird, part dove and part carrier pigeon, bearing in its beak a message to someone far away and missed. The maker and decorator puts their own message. 

The idea was, as always, to bridge people's experiences now (especially children's and young people's) and the area of human experience the Shrine is designed to express and shape. So I drew a template, not incidentally did it while working from home, and much more difficult than doing the artwork was figuring out how to get it scanned whilst living in 5km radius, everything closed, only four reasons to leave home lockdown. One of the small-business people in my street did it for me, and also this has a personal importance reflective of what it means to belong to and be grounded in a community. 

Our marketing people have been sending pictures every now and then of the bird doing its thing out in the wild. I love these, too. I will do a lot more of this kind of thing for work now.