Tuft : a love story

I watered a tuft of grass growing from a crack in the city until it died. A quiet act of love, control, and projection—an allegory for our own misguided caretaking of everything we think needs saving.

You can’t always do what you would like to do, but you can always be thinking about it. Sometimes just through keeping your mind centred on an objective it will seep its way into your reality too - however far disconnected from your goal our capital driven consumer society has led you. 


In simple words,  just because you must support yourself through work does not mean you cannot still create, you must just be creative with it: prolific in your thinking and generous (to yourself) with what time you can spare.



It was exactly this I was trying to work out a means of enacting one of those cold bleary eyes mornings you are dragging yourself to work against the tide of fellow capitalists around, when I saw a means of turning the repetition of my everyday of everyday: the same walk, the same talks, the same thoughts, into a device for a project. 




Every day I would walk the same route, everyday I could see the same things. What sense of change could you make in the otherwise familiar?




There was a corner on the way to work. Right beside the Guardian office building where I once partook in a small protest against their representation of Palestinian people in light of recent events, when I first saw the tuft. ( I say first saw, though another iteration of its humble natural form had been documented a year or so prior [the images used throughout this prose], in a much more pronounced state, an obelisk of nature; bucolic beauty bursting through a barren break in the hard concrete tiles of our environment - a link straight to a field, any field, of my youth)




Forcing its way out of a crack in the asphalt. Forcing its way into the simulation of our environment. A small tuft of grass, as if taken right from a field of the days of my youth, was fighting to survive. 




That morning I didn’t do much about it, I looked, I may even have stopped. But soon remembered my true purpose of taking this tread worn walk, with which I was sucked up into the gust of fellow commuters around. All day it stayed with me though. An image of resilience, an image of survival - a stubborn mark of nature buffeted in the wind alley created by the towering buildings in surround.




I walked back that evening and stared a little longer. At this point I didn’t have a camera with me, but I did still have the majority of a bottle of water (always have been terrible at keeping myself hydrated, guess a reflection of an incapacity to function at most any level if uncap-able of this most basic necessity of existence) so poured the bottle out onto the light grey concrete below. My water bled across the pavement, seeping a little into the crack from which the tuft defiantly grew but largely banding out in tributaries onto the road below. 




Tomorrow on my way back from work I was armed with a pencil, a camera, and a bottle of water (this time intentionally filled for my new friend in the flora). Observing the scene for a while, lifting the camera to my eye, shifting. Lifting the camera to my eye, crouching. Eventually I found a spot. I like it. I drew a line on the concrete with my pencil. Making sure it was thick and obvious, hoping it could defy the weathering of feet and atmosphere above. I took the first photo, stood on my mark, crouched, took another photo. Then, I headed over to the crack, spilled my bottle on the pavement then took my mark again, one final time documenting the newly formed tributaries of liquid life crawling their way across the hard pavement.





This continued for a week or so, everyday on the way back from work this became a new part of my otherwise mundane routine. Sometimes people would stop and ask what I was doing, once I could even see in a mans eyes that he understood, most eyes just glazed over however; at the enthusiasm that suddenly squirted from my form - it’s funny how people might ask what you are doing if out of the ordinary, until they realise that they didn’t actually really ever care.. one man I started to see regularly however. He never said anything but he was always watching… across the other side of the street with a hard hat and hi-vis jacket - there was a lot of new construction work going up here, often I overheard people discussing how the new google head office they were building was going to be as long horizontally as the shard was vertically (why was that important?). Anyway, he looked as I watered. And one day, I came back and the street had been scraped clean of life. Not just on the wall I had been documenting, but all over.. every crack eradicated of moss and weeds, nothing but dust now in the cracks…. Now I’m not saying it was the aforementioned man that did it, but he certainly looked set to uphold the ideals of our urban environment: nature contained, nature controlled, nature in a plant pot.




Immediately my heart wrenched. It was quite shocking, no, it was very shocking. To see such a harmless icon of nature slowly growing (it felt like now almost in my responsibility) eradicated from the face of this pavement. No matter, I thought. I followed the same routine I had before. Now watering literally a wall and a barren concrete slabbed floor, aware of the nature that it must be keeping out from below - nature is resilient. It didn’t take many days before shoots started to show again. 




Suddenly I felt myself even more captured by the project, having now seen the plant grow from nothing more than a little shoot into a veritable blade of something. I was suddenly planning my weekends - the only time that the standard capitalist regime leaves us to ourselves, around the watering and documentation of growth of the tuft. ( Funny how I can never keep a house plant alive , perhaps if this obsession with outside growth were applied to any element of my own inside things would be different…) 




Weeks turned into months and I hadn’t left Kings Cross for more than a day in all that time. I was going a little mad. Walking from the hospital, along the road to work. Admiring my little grassy friend before heading into work for the day. All day dreaming of her thirsty little roots and her ever growing shoots. Days end, I would spend my daily 15 minutes with her, then I’d be off. Sometimes I myself was drunk. I would come by night and the unsteadiness of the photos would reflect the unsteadiness of my mind. Other times it was raining, it almost felt superfluous to contribute the contents of my bottle onto my sacred spot, but there was a little cover provided from the towering buildings above, and I felt that my little tuft friend would think something was up if I didn’t shower her with my love and hydration so without a fail I watered and I recorded.




Months had passed. Maybe 7, maybe 8 ? Routine of the everyday had morphed into a personal routine. I was in love with my blades of grass. My friend Joe told me about a little festival he was going to out of the city. I was desperate for an escape, I was desperate to be surrounded by natural fields of grass, not this unnatural blade growing so out of place… was it wrong for me to leave her? Was it cheating even ? We discussed it together and she said it was fine. I had been very committed for months and she understood that sometimes its best to see other glades too. It might even make us stronger. I was glad she understood and agreed with her words, however it still took a lot for me to get on that train, in fact - I missed the first two meaning I had to wait for the slow one. Fortunately aided by a different sort of grass and a can of Heineken or two that time passed quite quickly without too much  of the sense of guilt. 




Once at the festival I hate to admit but all thought of my grass had gone.. surrounded by unrelenting unapologetic uninhibited nature all thought of the constraints of the concrete jungle left me. I was back in myself, back in nature. That night I slept below the stars with the grass between my toes. 1 day turned to 3 and before I knew it it was the week again, work had broken for summer so it wasn’t an enforced part of my routine I was missing.. it was the grass… 




A friend gave me a lift to the station and I jumped straight on the first train to kings cross. Without even thinking to head home and drop my bags I zoned straight for the corner where my friend in flora should have been waiting for me. I couldn’t believe my eyes.. dried and withered, the tuft of grass I had tended with love and adoration had perished in my absence.. perhaps most shocking was that the other patches of rebellious nature forcing through the cracks in the immediate surround existed exactly as they had as I had left.. it suddenly dawned on me with a chill… nature had grown dependent on me… her roots had grown lazy and stopped searching out like little capillaries below ground, searching for any amount of water - it had grown to expect it from me….. In my absence, such an oh so relatively short absence, she had withered up and died.. I felt terrible, truly terrible. That evening merely documenting the fact of the demise. I was tempted to not even water again now aware of my impact as a presence in the project as a whole.. it felt right to maintain tradition however, so almost as a farewell repeated our time tread tradition.




I wandered back hungover and depressed. Stepping into the dark belly of the hospitals underground I felt very far from nature.. how was it that I had taken the natures nature away too? Is that not one of the most beautiful things about nature, its resilience, its presence, its guarantee of growth in the places least expected.. but as now learnt, only if left alone to be by its nature.. otherwise it too , so similar in a way to where we humans (also part of nature, let it not be forgot) find ourselves.. dependent on a society of familiarity.. of dependability… 




My tutor John wrote his letter of retirement (deciding to take an early one by a year or so having worked his whole life for the man) and on that very evening of writing the letter died of a heart attack in his sleep. Could it be that in the same way that the grass had grown dependent on the constance of my routine that John too had grown dependent, no matter how much he had grown to hate it, of the responsibility and creative nourishment of the students he had taught for years?




I miss John a lot. He was like a surrogate father to me. Strangely of all the deaths I’ve experienced first hand so far (perhaps too many given my age) his is the one that comes as the most shocking.. maybe due to its closeness in time, perhaps due to the relationship we shared. Despite his age (in his early 60s) he was undoubtedly one of the most alive people I have ever met. Anyway , he deserves a lot more than a digression in some writing about some grass I fell in love with, so something for him will follow. I’ll say it again though - I miss you John.




Back to the grass: In the midst of the project it felt like it had no end. Now that there was an end that I could not go back from it forced me to look at the project in a different light. One looking back to that which was as it was now, as opposed to imagining that which could be in the future. For a week or so I continued my routine but it was no good. There was no change in the grass, it was gone. I decided to contact print by hand every frame I had shot for the project (3 x 30 x 8). As you can imagine this took a while. Eventually, I was left with a collection of temporal notes in positive, bringing back to light the life contained with in the negatives. These notes allowed me to see the progression of growth, initially I planned to use only one image per day , but seeing as they had all been made and things are nice in threes I kept them all. Making a folding concertina book almost in the shape of a pyramid - both serving structurally as the wider base allowed the book to stand more properly, and theoretically in the sense that it reminded me of an ancient Egyptian pyramid, structures built to house the remnants of their most important ones.. and what was nature if not one of the most important things? (In any form) this also led me to the brain wave of actually keeping the grass itself with in the bounds of the book. 




Having been avoiding for a few days now going back to the corner since the loss of the grass, I finally took myself back to the site of my devastation. Gingerly collecting the dried tufts I placed them in a little cardboard box I had brought with me, documenting the scene one last time. Something else funny happened while I was there that day too. For weeks they had been doing some work on the road, I believe putting in a new cycle road? Anyway. On this particular day they were working right at the corner, the site of the sight of the loss. A great slab of asphalt , adorned with remnant of double yellow line was there waiting for me. Separated from the form of the world around it by the hand of man who had initially placed it. The basis of our separation from the environment (a natural environment). A mark of how our simulated world had become our master, as opposed to the natural cycle of things above and below… 




Carrying home my slab of road and dried blades of grass I was happy. It seemed in a small trip the project had suddenly become complete. Placing my concertina book on the asphalt I had found it became a plinth for the nature slowly being eroded in the pages of the book above. To seal all this off, in faux gold leaf, to mimic the tops of Ancient Egyptian pyramids I sealed in my tufts of grass on the front cover, as well as the band made of board to contain the grasses story within. 


Nature had been lost, at least here there was evidence of its demise. You must leave nature be, unless ready to take responsibility for it in totality. I’m sure that the tuft of grass would return next year, prolific once its roots have taken hold, I couldn’t say for the nature we had once held within….