Nine Nights on the Depot Wall

The freight depot had been empty for six years when the permission finally came through. Nine metres of unbroken concrete, north-facing, with a sodium lamp that flickered on a two-second cycle.

Cold changes everything

Aerosol behaves differently below four degrees. The propellant loses pressure, the paint goes matte and grainy, and every fade you plan turns into a hard edge. I ended up keeping twelve cans inside my jacket at all times and rotating them like a relay team.

The wall taught me more about restraint in nine nights than four years of formal training.

The letterforms

The whole piece is built from ice-fracture geometry. I spent an afternoon photographing cracked puddles and traced the branching into the arrows. Nothing in the piece is a straight line drawn by hand — every angle came off a photograph of something breaking.

And then it was gone

Demolition started four hours after the final photograph. That is the deal you make with the street: the work is temporary, the image is not.