Summer Exhibition 2009 - Panorama
Mammatus Clouds are pouch-like cloud structures and a rare example of clouds in sinking air. Sometimes very ominous in appearance, mammatus clouds are harmless and do not mean that a tornado is about to form - a commonly held misconception. In fact, mammatus are usually seen after the worst of a thunderstorm has passed.
"To cover the world, to cross it in every direction, will only ever be to know a few square metres of it, a few acres, tiny incursions into disembodied vestiges, small, incidental excitements, improbable quests congealed in a mawkish haze a few details of which will remain in our memory: out beyond the railway stations and the roads, and the gleaming runways of airports, and the narrow strips of land illuminated for a brief moment by an overnight express, out beyond the panoramas too long anticitpated and discovered too late, and the accumulations of stones and the accumulations of works of art, it will be three children perhaps running along a bright white road, or else a small house on the way out of Avignon, with a wooden lattice door once painted green, the silhouetted outline of trees on top of a hill, ... And with these, the sense of the world’s concreteness, irreducible, immediate, tangible, of something clear and closer to us: of the world, not longer as a journey having constantly to be met, not as the pretext for a despairing acquisitiveness, nor as the illusion of a conquest, but as the rediscovery of a meaning, the perceiving that the earth is a form of writing, a geography of which we had forgotten that we ourselves are the authors...
... The parallel alignment of two series of buildings defines what is known as a street. The street is a space bordered, generally on its two longest sides, by houses; the street is what separates houses from each other, and also what enables us to get from one house to another, by going either along or across a street. In addition, the street is what enables us to identify houses. Various systems of identification exist. The most widespread, in our own day and our part of the world, consists in giving a name to the street and numbers to the houses. Contrary to the buildings, which almost always belong to someone, the streets in principle belong to no one. They are divided up, fairly equitably, into a zone reserved for motor vehicles , known as the roadway, and two zones, narrower obviously, reserved for pedestrians, which are called pavements. A certain number of streets are exclusively for pedestrians, either permanently or else on particular occasions. Only frequently are there trees in the streets. When there are, they have railings aroud them.... Agreed, there are the neighbours, the locals, the tradespeople, the dairy, the everything for the home, the tobacconist who stays open on Sunday, the chemist, the post office, the cafe where you are, if not an habitue then at least a regular (you shake hands with the patron or the waitress). Obviously, you could cultivate these habits, always go to the same butcher’s, open an account at the ironmonger’s, call the pharmacist by her first name, entrust your cat to the woman who sells newspapers, but it wouldn’t work, it still wouldn’t make a life, could’nt even give the illusion of being a life. It would create a familiar space, would give rise to an itinerary, a pretext for a few limp handshakes, but that would only ever be putting a mawkish face on necessity, a way of dressing up commercialism.
Obviously, you could start an orchestra, or put on street theatre. Bring the neighbourhood alive, as they say. Weld the people of a street or a group of streets together by something more than a mere connivance: by making demands on them, making them fight." (George Perec)
