First evening of exhibition preperations

Interesting evening doing my exhibition preparations at the Bankley Gallery last night - here are a few photos:

This first one was actually taken on Sunday after I moved all my materials over by taxi (except for the materials I forgot which is very typical of me) the framed images aren't going to be part of the main concept but just put along the side - as I may be able to actually make some money from this if they are about...  One hundred or so squares of collaged photocopies are on the floor with the exception of the one I staple gunned to the wall - as a little bit of test to see how it would look. Yesterday evening I did the same with but with about thirty squares, using them to cover the upper perimeter of the gallery walls - then I cut shapes out of the squares and staple gunned those do underneath - which had the resulting effect:

So it's a case of creating this contrast between white and densely interlaced infrequently repeating patterns and the whiteness of the gallery's walls - the next decided step was to staple gun more squares in places so the patterns could reach the bottom of the wall:


Then repeat the previous movement of cutting shapes out of the squares and moving these further downwards too - some of which to stretch across the floor and right into the middle of the room:

And there you have it - a very simplistic summary of an entire 12 hours work - didn't include all the stuff about bruising my hand, breaking a mug, breaking my staple gun and making a very lazy and quite dull introduction and quick removal of some very day glo colours - I'll get colour in this eventually, I think.... the next step will be to place some white paper in selective places underneath all the pattern tendrils on the floor - this will hopefully make the white from the wall appear to see into the floor in a similar fashion as the photocopies do.

If you haven't already confirmed whether or not your attending the event via Facebook feel free to do so now just here if only to make me look really, really popular.  Speaking of which I have another preview event two weeks after this one on Beech Road in Chorlton somewhere - completely different kettle of fish as it's all framed work and with other artists but it's good all the same, two exhibitions in one month and then possibly not another one for the rest of my life - who knows?

Gloop, bones, repeat, death, endless (in colour)

Close ups and black outs

I've been using my black and white collages as an element of a lot of my work for the past year or so - I produced about 20 of them at first - I blutacked them all onto my bedroom walls as I made them and what became immediately apparent was how patterns would emerge out at me like bizarre imaginary landscapes... or ligaments, buildings, cityscapes, creatures and faces - sometimes all of these and much more all at the same time.  Like my brain created associations - though never fully settled on any of them.  So when I photocopied all these collages I sometimes used to draw out the associations by darkening certain areas with black marker.

So what started out as this:


Became this:

Which to me brought out the image of a strange mechanical heart running a mechanism of chaotic unconnected non-cogs.  Like a the centre of a planet which is spinning the world wildly and uncontrolled around it whilst fragmented cities build bizarre and unnecessary and inevitable structures.

Here are a few more:

This looks like a skull or x ray telepathically linked to a far off malevolent nothingness.  Links between the dead and near dead - neither is which is fully aware of the other or even of themselves - much like life it's a wild flailing smothered by a leaden control mechanism.

Here is a creature with a very thin neck and a very large overbite.  Made out of junk and old bits of food it doesn't so much as digest but dissolve but only in certain places - making it freeze into a fixed position - a creaky statue trying to move but without the necessary gunk in it's joints for elasticity.

Some half formed organism unable to connect with it's own limbs, sort of comatose and unaware of itself throwing out elements of it's thinking and feeling mind onto some chaotic 2D computer game platform created simplistically from a lack of it's comprehension of a wider image.  The background is spinning but the foreground spins with it at the same velocity - but at a further distance.  Even though it's closer.  Somehow it's never all completely lined up but it exists in a series of very limiting compartments.  All of which exist in a constant yet remain unreachable.

Inside these compartments - and they are reachable, really, it all just buzzes through some sort of mixed static that shift - like daydreams on the bus when I reality clouds over and things pool together into one big intangible thought process.

Finally a graveyard ligament - a disconnected shoulder bone bridged to another - connective tissues building faces and life forms and showing the organic in the still and happening.  A bit like these words - somehow a bit pretentious and overly non specific.  But unlike these words these images aren't trying to second guess their audience - because I think when it comes to the imagery and not the explanation of what I see in the imagery I don't impose anything on the audience or expect it to need an explanation.
So as a small sample and perhaps not even a best possible example (maybe better examples later) I was hoping to to get across how having these things on my walls gave me an awful lot to stare at and brought up associations I never really knew existed - even though I made them.  Although that's not exactly some big achievement of knowledge, if anything creating abstract collages from stills of abstract animations created from photographs of my collages, paintings and drawings is likely to entirely blur my sense of association into an out of focus globule - though due to having perfect eyesight the blurry globule is certainly quite sharp and pixellated.  It's me living in a world of my own head of constant opposites and contradictions.  I'm so accustomed to not being accustomed that I'm rather accustomed.

Pictures probably not at an exhibition

I've not made a blog post over the last week or two because I haven't really anything new or exciting to up date it with - I've been continuing with the promotion of my exhibition and wall paper pasting bits of very familiar texture onto bits of old cardboard boxes.  During preparations for making my huge collage at the Bankley Gallery it did occur to me that perhaps I should exhibit some normal pictures too - because I might be able to sell them and actually make a bit of money.  I would have to make sure there was enough room and I'd also like the images to fit into context with the larger scale installation - which may be difficult.  Also it may be difficult to transport them - especially this one.

Well if there is a wall or area spare at my exhibition perhaps I could disorganizedly display a few of my A1 pictures from last year along the wall.  Disorganised because that's the whole point of my exhibition - instead of the usual clinical deadness of most galleries I want the actual space to be the art rather than just contain it in a boring unreachable bubble.

So in this post I am going to run through all ten of the A1 collages I could or could not display.  This is because I have nothing more to talk about at this juncture - and this blog is all about covering my past as well as my present and future.  A full blown coverage of me in all temporal forms.  Well the image to the left is the first of ten of the A1 images I made in the space of a two months.  Possibly one of the most complex and the one that took the longest I think as I wasn't quite sure what I was doing - saying that though it's possibly the most naturalistic.  I see it as a scream of linear crying out from a chaotic limbo.  Or a wall built against the harshness of everything else, blending in as it extends away from the centre of something.

Next I made this piece which is based on a doodle I did the morning before at work - I was more aware of trying to create a narrative in this case it is a narrative of an exploding biosphere - quite simple as a narrative really, no people involved in the process, no actual characters - somehow a pressure builds within a self contained system.  It builds to the point that it self destructs.  This could probably be a good analogy of just about anything - like stretching an elastic band too much, or brushing your teeth too hard or watching your stomach expand to an improbable size.  If you follow the image from left to right you can see two versions of the same structure, the latter versions shattering.  All things reach a certain pressure point and then they break. 

Either that or they maintain a stable equilibrium where they float on by just going about there own business - unaware like amoebas, no proper pressure just the dull blankness of non awareness, like the way that a cell stretching forward from a plant may feel - it's still a form of decline and a form of stretching thinner or fatter but emptier along a course of bleak non meaning.  The left image has issues I feel with being a little bit too over designed and too perfect.  It recalls my circle obsession I had for years after finishing university.  The spheres do not actually get across any true sense of the cause and effect they are trying to imitate.  This one isn't a complete failure at all - just an experiment in a long line of experiments.

This is an experiment in reaction to the piece of experiment above - to use the same collage method but with a more chaotic approach - though still with another system.  This time it was to layer over the top of one another over and over again an E shape.  So with these E layers I eventually came up with this odd semi symmetrical structure - texture is used as the final layer along with black for the purpose of outlining the structures - to me it calls to mind a rotting similarity in a pile of disused unoriginal souls all spraying their same old coolness for a brief spell before the fire dies out and they all go into their dead holes.  I didn't use the letter E in some sort of homage to any Madchester scene, I just liked the shape as I don't tend to use many square shapes and thought maybe it was time.

Then I started applying my techniques to some quite familiar types of composition.  The left image being a cityscape and the right image being an explosion.  Through my texture and my methods they are quite unique stylistically though compositionally unoriginal - the first being like any old cityscape and the second being like a pop art explosion.  Both pieces are relateable to it the sense that they both actually look tangible.  I did actually sell the cityscape image at the Didsbury Arts Festival last year for £150 so maybe, now that I think about it, I should frame up the explosion and try to sell that too.  Though perhaps not at my exhibition - because I'm already having second thoughts about putting all this work up.  Not only because it wouldn't fit into context but because I don't know if I can afford the frames at the moment.  Even very cheap ones.  Still - I'm glad I'm writing about these.

This image of a partial nexus also took quite a lot of time - I went into it with no plan at all - so it developed entirely organically until I tried to organise it into a finished piece that was coherent - which I somehow managed to do - so it looks structured but has a very real uncertainty - possibly my favourite in many ways out of all the images.  This was not sold at the Didsbury Arts Festival but ALMOST sold.  Almost isn't really good enough though - it's now in a fancy frame at my art dealer's flat... framed the wrong way up.  Dear dear dear me.

And then we have one of my least favourites.  It doesn't depict anything my internal world at all though I'm not sure it's trying to - it's just another dabbling with compositions - another experiment and it seems to do the experiment well but at the same time doesn't really discover anything or do anything new.  One thing about it though is there's a chance that if it was framed there is a certain demographic who would want to buy this.  I'm thinking people who like spiritual art which when you actually look at it is actually style over substance and bears no relevance to spirituality - like a simplified diagram of karma or "energy".  I sort of like the strange circular hieroglyphs - it's like code in another language.  With funny little flags going up into the air and weird wavey dragon beams.  It makes absolutely no sense at all but you really do just have to try things out and see how they go.  Not everything you produce can be brilliant and even if you don't like it there might be someone else out there who does even though you completely hate it - in some ways I sort of dislike quite a lot of my art - it's very hard to separate oneself from it and view it objectively.  Subjectively I actually hate this piece.  Proper hate.

This one I actually really really like even though it doesn't necessarily get across anything about "my own internal world" it does actually look like something in a way that I want it to look like something - it's not massively original but I really directions and the colours and everything about it.  It's just really good.  It reminds me of the rain.  I like the rain, but it's more like a slow rain, a rain that slows you down and is slowed down and that stops everything - rain being turned into stone and coagulated into thin pillars making funny animal sculptures in the sky.  That sounds like a pretty cool world to me, a magnolia, frozen to stone and rainy world.  This picture works better than the one above because it has better colours and it makes sense in a physical way - it's essentially a surrealist landscape though I wouldn't call it that at the time I made it - I was dead impressed even though nobody else was. 

I was just wondering - completely off topic - if my exhibition goes well and if I get more from it, with the possibility of getting commissions (I can dream) then maybe I could dispense with the traditional method of making pictures in rectangles and move onto building images in shapes that are more exciting.

Last image - and boy am I tired now.  This is like some sort of loony tunes logo being attacked by spikes of annoyed children's consciousness.  Except it's not that.  This is the final piece I did based on a image I drew on the back of an envelope - it's quite a striking composition and though I didn't like it when I made it I like it now in hindsight.  The original envelope drawing was a tonne of sharp speech bubbles speaking pattern stabbing into some centre of nothing - giving the impression of either a centre speaking or a centre sucking - it also looks like toothache, like teeth being pulled.  The red is full of pain and torture.  All the above interpretations of all these pictures are completely subjective to me.  If you really want to know what I think any of them mean then they all mean the same thing - they are all conveying me, all sort of lost and doing my own thing, on my own, because that's how I do my thing, there is no involvement in my work from you or from anybody else.  Your free to interpret but the meaning of this to me is actually just my feedback loop of abstract lawn mower noise.  I have no idea of whats going on and when I look deep down into my soul or anyone else's I know that deep down there is a big gaping nothing.  That we are all sort of illusions of ourselves.  I know this and then I don't know it, and then I know it again, then I don't know it.  And so on.  My artwork is expressing this knowing then not knowing - it's like some sort of rip tide between the world and the empty.  The nothing and everything existing simultaneously in my head, though somewhere there's a sense of a presence which is actually a big glowing interesting something, though not sure what it is.  Though it is a thing. 

Well anyway I'm going to stop writing now.  I have some actual tangible problems to solve.  Like getting some sleep.

Boxrooms, light shades and public art

I'm dredging up little things I did last year now - simply because they remain impressive to me.  The first being the lampshade in my bedroom that I made out of garden wire, double sided sticky tape, lots of perspex and a few bits of black cardboard.  It's made my boxroom a much cooler place to live in. My existence in my box room is compartmentalised into tiny areas that make sense through my own logic - it's actually one of the only places in the world in which I actually feel comfortable. It's small, enclosed, cosy and I don't feel bad if I don't bother opening the curtains because I have really comforting red light shining through different coloured perspex.  It actually makes artificial light very comforting.

This probably isn't "normal" but I do seem to have my curtains closed quite a lot of the time.  That might actually be quite unhealthy - and also a bit of a waste of electricity.  The thought of opening my curtains doesn't usually occur to me.  Why would it?  I have a cool light.
 I've a few other tricks that have made my boxroom the best room I've ever lived in - one of which is to stick mirrored paper to the wall.  Back in ancient Rome they used to decorate their walls with images of other rooms so that there was an appearance of their rooms being bigger than they actually were - creating an artificial grandness.  By sticking mirrored paper on the wall I'm creating a similar effect, I'm making my room seem bigger whilst at the same time reflecting off the dull white wall lots of the scrumptious light.  Also I keep lots of my collages on the walls so that gives me some texture to stare at when I'm thinking... much of my life has been spent staring at walls and thinking so it's good to have some texture to look at - and it's texture I made myself so I get bonus points for being self indulgent.
I have the most self indulgent boxroom in the entire world.  Here's a pseudo panoramic shot of some of it... apologies for the picture quality - might be better if I had some natural light.

So a wardrobe complete with a door covered in coats and scarves - a wall full of collage and a bit of mirrored paper (the main area of this is above my bed on the opposite wall) - a chair where I put my computer when I'm watching television on my crosstrainer (the little monster sat on the chair on this photo is a small version of myself made by my amazing monster making friend Helen - more details here http://helenmakes.blogspot.com (bit of shameless plugging from me there))....  I do feel like I've created my own mini paradise in this room - like the whole place is a little area of the world where I feel like a normal person because to me all of this looks perfectly acceptable - it's like my cerebral innards are projected mentally all over the place and reality assumes the image that makes me the most comfortable.  Like a perfect zero environment where everything is peaceful and is made entirely out of me.

The outside world is a strange place - I do a fair bit of staring at flat surfaces and thinking when I'm in the outside world too - except there you have to watch out who's staring at you and thinking (or trying to think).  Humanity en mass seems to be a collection of quivering nerve endings on the back of some out of proportion protoplasmic amoeba.  It's like a lot of souls and minds trapped in flesh and not quite understanding what they are meant to be doing.  Getting on the bus everyday is like stepping into some bizarre liminal space.  An area of life between real moments where nothing much happens.  So when you look around everyone is sat there, not communicating, having a strange private moment thinking and drifting off into there own internal quandaries.  For me I either read a book or let my mind go into a static abstract haze.  Both of those things are a form of escapism from the rigours of doing.  I'm assuming everyone escapes into there own little worlds and then jolt back out.  This goes on for people all day long.  It goes on for me all day long anyway - so maybe I'm just projecting my condition onto other people.

This all brings me onto the other project I made last year that I felt like revisiting (again because I'm still quite impressed by it) which is my public art piece I wallpaper pasted onto a (non listed) building.  An old disused public toilet at the edge of Chorlton.  I spent a lot of time emailing various departments in the City Council investigating the legalities of doing something like this and getting away with it.  To the left you'll see a picture of the building - it's a really good piece of cheap architecture of yesteryear with some very ugly graffiti.  A little bit of collage would make this building much nicer looking and would accentuate it's forgotten beauty to the general public - the public unlikely to notice it because it's next to a bus stop (too busy catching buses).

There were a few contradictions in the law - one day I was told I could do it as long as I wasn't advertising anything and that I didn't do it on a listed building.  Then I was told by another department that they would need to get in touch with the local police department first.  This was all happening in October and the good weather was about to leave us so I just went ahead and did it anyway - pre-made some shapes and went down there at about 6 in the morning put on a hooded coat on and just got on with it.

And so there you go.  Doesn't it look more interesting?  In my haste I didn't cover up the word "scum" but at least I got "nazi" covered over.  It rained over the time that this work was up so the wallpaper paste was never ever completely dry.  So it had an oozing quality to it.  My plan was to leave it there and take a photo of it every few days, waiting for it to decay and fall off the walls - my whole point was that my act of vandalism was bio degradable - and that it would demonstrate how change happens all around us all the time even though we feel safe in our houses and boxrooms life is very much at the mercy of decay and change.  I was also hoping that other people might add something more to the work and that it might inspire people to glam up more of our rubbish old forgotten buildings.  I was quite excited about what I was doing at this point.  Though that didn't last long as four days later the whole thing was removed by the City Council - but they also removed the "nazi scum" graffiti so I feel like I've done at least some good.  Now the entire building is covered over by a huge placard.

To finish this entry off here's a close up of the above (one of many failed projects):

Twitter, marketing, advertising and what am I doing?

Recently started using my twitter properly - I've not got a great many followers yet but I've decided not to play it as some sort of numbers game, I'm only going to follow people I'm interested in and who I think are going to be interested in me.  Otherwise what's the point?  I'm at @garth_simmons if you are interested and interesting (and if your interested in me I'm sure you're very much interesting).

I have to work hard on twitter for the next month or so as it's part of my marketing campaign for my exhibition on 2nd July - I've also started a Facebook Event for it (http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=214540905242158).

It's also listed on this website I've never even heard of: http://www.kulone.com/GB/Event/2216870-DISTORTED-INTERIOR-BARRIERS-Exhibition

So this isn't a very creative update at all - it's just going on about how I've momentarily become some sort of cut throat marketeer.  Which is a little out of character really - I feel like my life has a new script editor.  Not to worry though - I've started doing some paintings/collages that I'll update you on when I finish them - I'm taking the compositions from stills of animations I made a two/three years ago.

Just so this new blog entry has at least one picture in it - here's one of the images I'm basing a composition on:

Promotional Postcard Design

The idea of my exhibition is to distort the gallery walls and floor through the application of collage, coloured paper, and some objects too - perhaps some furniture (anything big and broken so feel free to donate anything to me).  All those things will change the perspective of the room and work against the hum drum method visual art is usually presented:  rectangular panels separated by long expanses of white wall.  You know the type - there's no avoiding this when I usually exhibit in galleries because it is the done thing, so I would play the game and just put a few pictures up alongside everyone else.  Now that I have a solo exhibition I have no excuse to not exhibit my work in a way which is more suitable to what I've always been wanting to do with my work.  Which is to cover the walls in wide expanses of crazy texture and confound the viewer with an overwhelming depth of static, nonsense and contrarily busy void.

One of the problems with this approach is how to promote it - I haven't put this picture together yet, I have all the ingredients prepared but I don't have a photo of what it's going to look like.  So the best I can do is create an artistic impression of a 3D space - annoyingly this artistic impression will be confined to the size of a postcard - a rectangular space.

Anyway I started work on this trying to create 3D spaces just using copies of my texture but this didn't really go very far - it looked too much like it was made on a computer - which it was.  So I readjusted my method and took some photos of corners and corridors and then worked over the top of them with colours and textures.  The results are just below, showing how they were layered step by step:

Now these are okay but they are not really getting across what it is that's going to be happening (even if what is happening ends up becoming a non happening) - they still look quite computery, a bit first year graphic design, even worse, these look a bit psychedelic.

Anyway in the next few images I put these images inside one another and try to make look a little more complex.  I wanted to create something that looked like an interior of a room - but then not too much like a room either - more like a distorted room.... as I'm all about distorting rooms.

So I looped designs into one another over and over again making them more complicated and perhaps less relevant:

 

As you can see by the bottom image I found something quite relevant... still arguably a little psychedelic though - but at least it gets across some view of a skewed and bizarre interior.   On the back I'll write a little blurb explaining the exhibition - something along the lines of "through massive areas of texture and collage Garth Simmons creates an immersive environment of skewed perspectives and illusive scenery - visually distorting the gallery space and conjuring an atmosphere of colourful and dislocated chaos".  I promise I'll do a lot better than that - though I'm getting pretty good at writing this sort of definition - I think blogging has had the desired effect on my self definition skills.

The title of my exhibition may be a simple one.  I'm thinking it should be called "Dimensional distortions of a room".  I was going to go for something wordy - like the title of my Blog, but then decided against it - people never seem to understand what I mean by my wordy titles.  It's fairly simple to understand - if you are me.  They are also very hard to explain - if you are me.

(One day after posting this I designed the back of my promotional postcard:

It took all evening but I had to get it done so I could take advantage of a special offer at Vistaprint which ran out today - I rather like it though.... many thanks to my house mates for checking whether it was actually good or not, and also in improving my sentence structures.)

Colour Textures

Continuing the permutations of old bad quality photographs of my work from last year (detailed here:

http://garth-simmons.blogspot.com/2011/04/always-condensing-my-drifting-elements.html) I have ultimately put together about 60 A4 sheets of colourful texture - which isn't as big a task as it sounds, it didn't require much thought at all - as I've said it was just a use of patience and numbskull autonomy - the mind sleeps as the hands move and it nicely makes me forget where I am.  

Anyway I've pieced together several different mixtures of these textures together just below, they get more integrated and enlarged as they go along:

I'm not at all sure what I'm going to use these patterns for - I have some ideas but nothing conclusive.  My work generally goes through different phases - this is not a compositional phase, it's a more like a production line spewing out pattern and texture.  These come in handy later on - all I need to find is a cheap printer shop and I can reproduce copies of these images over and over again and splice them into one another and also into my other textures.  Then you get another texture which is a mixture of two textures but different from both.  

So the above has no deep metaphysical meaning it's just a lot of humming static waiting to be merged with lots of other humming static.  My work is actually, when I come to define it - a big static ball of humming static - it's quite empty but also entirely full all at the same time.  I'd say it's hard to judge what's in it because it's still embryonic and developing - smelting and changing into some melting smelching mulch until eventually it'll hopefully take the form of everything lacking in everywhere and everyone.  Which is quite a tall order wouldn't you say?

Wrecks

I was going to use my Sunday afternoon in the same way I used my Sunday morning.  Sat with the curtains closed in my bedroom under electric light sticking little bits of paper onto other little bits of paper - I would have continued doing this until all the paper that needed to be stuck to paper had been stuck to paper.  It was quite sunny outside though so by about 3 o'clock I decided to don my straw hat and sunglasses and have a brief walk in Chorlton Waterpark - find some shade, phone my mum for a bit, do a little bit of design work for my exhibition.  I realised in the early stretches of the Water Park that it would be difficult to avoid large groups of people, so I scampered up a little steep hill and sat up there and proceeded with my tasks.  It was an unpopulated and ignored area of the park with no discernible pathways and no people, just lots of plants.

So it got to a point I'd done all I needed to do - which didn't take long - I considered going on a familiar walk down the usual paths but when heading in that direction I was instantly bored and nearly stepped on a few wandering dogs - too much hustle and bustle for a clumsy type like me, I think boredom can enhance my clumsiness so I headed back homeward but got slightly bored on my way back down such a dull familiar path - so I scrambled back up the steep hill and ventured into the dense vegetation.  It took me back to my early teens, when I went into Edlington Woods on my lunch break as it was the perfect place to talk to oneself and think, also the best place to avoid the melting pot of children, all learning social survival instincts and pack mentality.  It was also a good place to develop a split personality, so the thoughts in your head would actually become like a different individual perched on a throne in your cerebral cortex screaming to get out and making petty sarcastic remarks - like discovering a secret imprisoned soul that's been smothered for the past decade but it's reawakening ready to become real and as a consequence making you as a person more real..... well.... depending on your perspective this new presence may make you seem less real - but then at the time I wasn't so much aware of everyone else's subjective viewpoints, my own viewpoint was like a rollercoaster swooshing past all the sights and sounds of real life so therefore not being able to take part.  Boo hoo.

Anyway I completely digress.... as I made my way through the thistles and thorns I was thinking about how much I like exploring ignored areas of woodland, and how it would be unlikely to find any burnt out cars hidden in Chorlton Waterpark like the ones I used to see all the time in Edlington Woods - because Edlington is well dodgy and Chorlton is well nice.

I carried on with my rambling ramble stepped over dead trees and branches grabbing a useful stick on my way and within a minute, perhaps two (who's counting?) I came across a burnt out car.  It wasn't just burnt out either - it was also crashed into a tree.  Result.

I was pretty surprised because this place is such a fun family orientated area - but then I suppose at night time it's not about that anymore - it's about dogging and burning stolen cars for insurance claims.  I used to know a man in Scarborough who used to take up missions of pretending to steal a car, burning it and then sharing a cut of the insurance money with the owner - he didn't spend the money on anything useful though, within 24 hours all the money would be spent on his fruit machine addiction because he couldn't "resist the bright lights".  Anyway I took a few photos of this car here:

And whilst I was playing detective I also found the empty container of gasoline used to burn the car - presumably after crashing it into a tree.  Because cars don't always explode when you crash them. 

I saw another burnt out car just a few feet away on on my way towards having a look I randomly found:

An old, rusty and mangled kitchen sink!  I really didn't see that coming.

I continued my detective game at the next car and found out the gangs name:

I deduced through my complex sleuth skills - reading - that the gang, group or organisation that destroyed these machines and threw in everything including the kitchen sink (just for good measure) is known as M21 - which is the post code of Chorlton - so it's good to know that even in the slightly more idyllic left wing and slightly posher areas of suburbia there are people who burn cars and mangle sinks.  It makes me feel much more at home knowing for a fact that this sort of thing is going on.  I like that they named themselves after a postcode, it reminds me of E17.  

You may have noticed that I gave the cars a good lookaround.  This isn't because I have any massive interest in cars, I actually don't like them at all, it's more because I was looking to see if there were bodies inside.  Not because I'm some sort of ghoul just because it's probably the sort of things you should check for.  I didn't actually get into the cars but maybe I would if I were wearing protective gloves and clothes which weren't so lovely.  Here are the rest of the photos of the second car:

I took my leave of the wreckages knowing that there would be unlikely anything more interesting to find and rambled through the woods until I found the exit to the park - very near to which I found something else unusual for the area:

Two very large and very nearly geometrically placed perfectly square sponges.  This one, I think, is surely the work of the government or some secret cabal or society.  Or maybe a homeless person put it together as a rudimentary bed.

Well I'm back home now about to start sticking bits of paper onto other bits of paper again in preparation for sticking the stuck on bits of paper to even bigger bits of paper.  I'm good at sticking bits of paper to bits of paper but perhaps I'd make a better living as an adventurer - knight errant or errant fool?  There is an interesting world out there though, and things that I can make the effort to find that no one else would normally come across, or even find interesting.  I should probably take to the road one day with some sort of quest.