Grids

The top photo is of an old window frame I found on the pavement yesterday, now on the wall. The lower one is an old drawer I found a few years ago, also on the pavement, now with ships added and also on the wall. I seem to have a thing (a typesetter’s thing?) about grids.

Not crosswords or sudoku, which I can’t manage at all. With those, what you enter into the grid is either right or it’s wrong; the content is predetermined. The window frame and the drawer are more like traditional forms of poetry, a sonnet or a ballad; the structure is a given, you don’t have to worry about that, but as for how you fill them in – and how you make the content play with or against the structure – the possibilities are infinite.

Two years ago I went to the house of an art collector in north London. Except that he didn’t collect paintings, he collected frames – hundreds of them, all over the house, carefully hung, empty. Well, yes; but they were lifeless things, waiting for something to happen inside them.