There is a scene in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie where the leading lady accidentally discovers the tin of a child’s special belongings - forty years old - hidden behind a tile in her bathroom. The narrator states that only the discoverer of Tutankhamen’s tomb could have known how she felt upon finding this treasure.

That which is claimed by decay has often agitated a kind of mystic curiosity in the human imagination, such that many of us homo-sapien-sapiens have avidly made a career out of adventuring the secrets of ancient ruins or decaying shipwrecks. It is not, I believe, purely a matter of morbid curiosity (although that may be part of it), nor is my concern the conquest of the explorer or the thrill of discovery. What I am really questioning here is the relationship that decay has with the imagination, and the way that it compels the mind (perceivably or in-perceivably) to fantasy.

I would like to examine decay under a plurality of manifestations, to render decay a genre of being more-so than a state of literal deterioration. Although admittedly a moderate re-invention of the word, the decay I wish to speak to is not simply something inevitable to the forgotten loaf in the breadbox; it is the phenomenon which renders typewriters and failed flying machines the relics of an era past, which lures us into cobwebbed attics on rainy days, and which quietly tiptoes around our memories and erases. I like to construct the process something like a jigsaw puzzle made up of thousands of pieces, and they begin to go missing one by one. Over time an object, an idea, a childhood, a first love begins to loose many of its ‘pieces’ so that the image retracts increasingly farther from from the original. Eventually, one is left with memories - with clues - and there is a sense that something lost and beautiful must have existed when the puzzle was once complete. And so we imagine - can’t help imagining - what that might have looked like or could have been.

As always, there are a plethora of ways to consider the reasons for finding fasciation in decay; perhaps the perishability of things resonates somewhere with the perishability of our very selves - a way of connecting to that fear without addressing it directly. My inclination towards the theme, however, is not one attached explicitly to the looming inevitability of death, as if beholding an omen each time the flesh of an apple browns. Nevertheless, the concept of loss, of things falling out of favor with time and modernity, are central to the way that I see all of this functioning.

A usual corollary of decay’s tendency to cause things to fade is a ‘lacking of’ through which it is fitted to give birth to the imaginary. Naturally, one who has a sea-foam green fender stratocaster does not fantasize about what it would be like to have a sea-foam green fender stratocaster. Any mental expeditions of that sort are satiated by reality having contained and defined the situation; having consumed wonder with available, contemporary information. Were that superb instrument, however, to become subject to house fire or a terrible, thoughtless cleaning spree, one might fantasize with wistful sighs as to what it was like to lay awake strumming during sleepless nights, with the moonlight gleaming over the rows of silver knobs. My own preoccupation with 'old things' is something that I am trying to explore in this way; perhaps not through a physical lack, but nonetheless a void that leaves me something to contribute. The general inclination is to think of the imagination as a place of boundless possibility, and in many ways there is truth to that perception, but it is not the full story. What most people fail to realize, I think, is that the imagination really is limited to a person's internal world that, whatever the influences may be, is tempered by an individual's identity. Decay as a doorway to fantasy is essentially a fairly intimate encounter with the self, and that may be why I find it so engaging.

For all I've been able to say, I still feel as though I know very little about how I shall go on to develop these ideas artistically in a way that I find both satisfactory and pleasing. For the moment I feel very much like a kite on string, waiting to be let out a little farther. Funnily, I suppose, I don't feel very much like the person holding the spool.