Art Around the House: Anonymous

I found this in the first year studio space at art school on clean-up day before the degree show one year. I cant remember which year. It was unnamed and unclaimed.

When I saw it I wanted it: partly for the carefully hollowed and halved cigarette at the centre and partly that it reminded me of a story about cigarettes that someone told me at a party years ago.

The story at the party was about a man who explained that during times of intoxication when he recognised his grasp on reality - particularly the passage of time - was waning to an unacceptable level, would smoke a cigarette. The cigarette would become a marker for how much time had passed. The cigarette was like a firey little anchor which would hold the whole situation together.

This anonymous cigarette-graph piece is now stuck by blu-tac in the kitchen, installed in the same manner as it was when I removed it from art school. It prompts various parents to question if I started smoking again. It is all humble and frail and might easily have been damaged beyond repair or thrown out a long time ago. Instead it sits seething on the kitchen wall in defiance of it's maker who abandoned it and all those who so assured of reality that they are not in need of any marker.