“You’re not wrong about that” he said, as he took a slug out of the bottle.
She said, “I wanna put it on the wall” as she snatched the stencil and made a lurch for the spray can.
“No way”, J said and grabbed the stencil back.
Carlisle St
Pakington St East St Kilda
When J went back to take another photo somebody had covered her stencil by leaning the mattress against a wall. She left it as it was. It wasn’t her turf.
So what did happen to Stash #1? It didn’t stay long under Simon Perry’s cushion. Did it get handed to the info desk at Linden Gallery or did somebody hand it to the police because there was money inside?
I can just hear the conversation now. “Has anybody lost three, one pound notes, a lock of brown hair, and an ad from the ‘Missing Friend’s’ column, all bundled up in old piece of mattress cloth?
What would the ‘old boys’ who used to live in the boarding house have to say about that (Linden used to be a boarding house until the early 80’s).
Acland St
Blessington St and Belford St
more to come…………………..
Starting 5th June in Australia
Cracks in the Pavement is an interactive project that calls attention to the ‘in-between’ spaces encountered throughout everyday life. The project focuses on details within the urban landscape and encourages close inspection of our social space. From June 5th artists based in the US, UK and Australia will respond to what they find in their urban environments by making art objects designed to be placed in sites that intrigue them – at bus shelters, in alleys, under bridges, in libraries or post offices, or deep in park bushes.
Members of the public are invited to search for these site-specific works using maps and clues provided at Cracks in the Pavement. Art works featured in Cracks in the Pavement may be kept by whoever finds them. Works not found will be allowed to remain in the landscape indefinitely to be encountered by chance, displaced, or transformed by the very environmental forces that define each piece’s context.
Sitting on his chair at his table, his grey stringy hair and his rounded shoulders. A shirt or two on a coat hanger, or two, hanging in the window. Five or six tins of things – milo, tomatoes, coffee, soup – in small stacks in his room. A picture in a frame on the wall. I’d walk past his place most days. I’d see him through his window, in his room, his grey stringy hair, his shoulders rounded, leaning over his table with his pen in his hand. Sometimes just standing, or combing his hair. He’d walk up the street heading home carrying a plastic supermarket bag or two, or three, with supermarket things in it, or them, most days.
Then I didn’t see him for a while. I saw him again a few weeks later when I was walking up Mitchell Street one day. There was a young woman with him who had curly hennaed hair and was wearing black-rimmed glasses. He had a suitcase in either hand and was about to load them into the boot of an old orange Datsun. The back seat was piled with boxes. I walked past his place. I looked through the window. There were no stacks of tins, no table, no chair and a light-coloured rectangle on the wall where his framed picture had been. When I was halfway to the supermarket the orange Datsun drove past me. The curly-haired woman was driving. He was in the passenger seat, his rounded shoulders, his grey stringy hair combed back. The next day, furniture and mattresses and stuff were in the garden of his rooming house. I took a wooden chair with a blue seat home. I saw two people carry a table down the street. The house which was his home, a big old rooming house, in which quite a few people had lived, sold for $2.8m.
Written by Moira Burke
Two more mattresses, this time in Carlisle St, J gets stuck on the past lives stuff again.. Love, pain, birth death, dreams, nightmares, if only a mattress could talk. They are single beds, she starts thinking about child abuse – J is glad they are mute.
She gets a text message from P.
Mtress alert Balaclava Stn. The camera batteries are flat.
She’ll have to miss this one.
J is taking a photo of more mattresses and sees K. She tells her that their conversation about dumpimg furniture has prompted this investigation.
K says “I can’t understand why people think they can just leave rubbish on the street”.
“I guess some people think they are being helpful by doing a bit of recycling. replies J.
Then she tells K about her neighbour who emptied the contents of his house into a skip. He was renting it out and was on a flying visit from Singapore where he lived most of the time.
J couldn’t stand the waste so she asked if she could salvage some of his rubbish. “He was really embarrassed and so was I, but in the end we both jumped into the skip and retreved all of the good stuff”. Some of it sat in the front garden for weeks until it was re-distributed through rooming houses, neighbours and Sacred Heart.
K said “oh if I see a something that’s good I always pull over and pick it up . My husband hates it”.
Taking L to school again, there are more mattresses in the street, these ones are wrecked. They are old St Kilda. Itinerant community, lots of short term rentals, people moving on but leaving a piece of their intimate history behind.
J thinks of all the times she’s seen some poor bugger camped out on a mouldy old piece of discarded bed in the park. Maybe that same mattress had been a site of love and comfort for a small child. Maybe in another life this poor bugger also had bed where there was love and comfort. But maybe the opposite was true. You don’t see people sleeping out so much now. St Kilda’s changing. J gets distracted by the springs they look so good and you wouldn’t find this stuff in… … …
More mattresses… about eight of them out the front of an old mansion, there are 2 men cleaning up. J asks if she can take a picture but starts firing off questions instead. Has this place been sold? The younger man says it used to be a boarding house. Did your family own it?
“Yes. Vlad is my uncle he lived here and was the Manager”.
Vlad says “finished, liquidated, no more.”
How many people lived there? “Twelve” comes the answer.
Have they all found new places?
“Yes, but there are two that haven’t moved on yet…”
J is getting pushier by the minute. Did you live there as a kid? “No” comes the reply.
Where are you going to live Vlad?
He says “liquidated, finished, no more”
They tell J she can take anything she wants. She is invited into the backyard. The only thing she takes is a photo. On the way out she takes a peep into the grand hallway as she passes, it’s gorgeous. J wonders how many people will live there in the building’s next incarnation.
Overnight somebody has added some art and 2 more mattresses have appeared across the road. This impulse for comfort reminded J of a story somebody told her during the margins, memories and markers project.
Wall-less Bedroom
I was running around the back streets of Theatreworks, looking for some evidence of the bag that was just stolen from my car. Down St Leonards Ave, took a cut-through to Neptune St through an empty block. And there, sleeping on a bed was a guy, with a bookshelf, clothes hanging in the tree, a supermarket trolley of things, and a few things scattered around. Just like any normal bedroom, but without the walls. Fascinating. That really diverted me from worrying about the $400 cash I just gave to someone who was good at picking locks. When I went back sometime later, the sleeping man and wall-less bedroom was gone, and someone had put up a temporary fence and a land-for-sale sign. Oh well.
It seems like the single mattress has gone……. but it has moved again, this time it’s in the laneway. J starts thinking about D. He used to be homeless. He used to sleep out sometimes. J wonders if he ever went looking for a street bed to add a bit of comfort.
I have always assumed that mattresses found on the streets of St Kilda would have had multiple owners, or the very least multiple users until I see these ones. The big one especially is in mint condition.
While I am taking the photo I meet C, she has just dropped her daughter off at school.
C says “I’ve just done a great big clean up and put a whole pile of stuff on street”.
Then she says “I’m really enjoying watching it disappear bit by bit, nothing like a bit of recycling”.
P and I go back later to get the pristine mattress, but somebody else had the same idea earlier …it’s gone already and the small mattress has moved down the street.