In a small room, there are twelve identical packing cases, each one heavier than its dimensions suggest. One, for example, contains most European cathedrals from the eleventh to fifteenth centuries, with all their innovations in vaulting and ever-airier walls, their shift from plain to historiated glazing, via delicate grisaille patterns and incorporating such techniques as flashing and even jewelling, and their vicious debates concerning transubstantiation and direct lay access to the Word of God. This is not what I want to tell you about, but just for a moment imagine the mass of all those relics and votive offerings. Can you even conceive of such a thing? Another of the cases holds parks and gardens, which sounds like it would be lighter, but consider centuries of trees and follies, the thunder of falling horse chestnuts, the kids growing from swings and slides to smoking dope in the shelters, and the sheer density of all those held hands and more-or-less sincere promises. To cut a long explanation into a neat rectangle that will fit on a page with white space to spare: if you can’t see it with your eyes, it’s in one of these cases. Now that we’ve established the precise parameters, I ask you – like one of those problems in the paper which allegedly reveals your IQ, only with a ticking clock and the risk of death or life-altering injury – what do you think is outside the room and can you even find the door?
Oz Hardwick,
Picture Nick Victor