Series: Memories Between Earth And Sky.
Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
Edition of 3
40.6 x 61 cm / 16 x 24 in
40.6 x 61 cm / 16 x 24 in
Hand-signed by the artist, with title, date, and edition number inscribed in ink on an archival label affixed to the reverse side of the mounted photograph
© The Artist
There is a particular kind of running that only children do, all arm and abandon, the body flung out after the feet, and here it is: a girl in a light dress tearing across an empty seafront road, one arm stretched wide, hand raised, mouth open in a shout or a laugh. Ahead of her a boy in a dark suit rides a kick-scooter, one foot planted on the deck, the other leg trailing behind, gliding just out of reach. She will not catch him. That is the whole comedy of the picture and, if you look a second longer, the whole small ache of it too.
Behind them Saint Louis performs its slow choreography of palms, a long receding avenue of them leaning toward the sea, and Idun-Tawiah fills the corners with lives that have nothing to do with the chase. Off to the left a couple stands close, half-embracing; to the right, on the low painted sea wall, another couple sits at the horizon’s edge, watching the water. The children rip through the foreground while the adults hold perfectly still, and the photograph seems, more than anything, to be about the distance between those two speeds of living.
The palms give it away, that seam of overcast light, the vintage tailoring on a boy young enough to be scootering down a promenade. This is memory dressed as present tense, childhood staged the way one actually remembers it, not as it looked but as it felt: someone always just ahead of you, the road impossibly wide open, the sea flat and patient. The couples at the wall are the future waiting at the far end of the run, and for now the girl keeps reaching, still fast enough to believe she might close the gap before the afternoon ends.