Hello. You catch me at a strange time. I’m here in Sydney, an Australian city where the sun shines all winter and the birdsong is the screech of banshees. I’ve decided to give up sleep, as it has abandoned me; I was never entirely sure of the point of it anyway.
The purpose of this post is to solicit submissions – well, votive offerings, really – to a shrine that I’m constructing. I’m here in this place to build a Panic Office. It’s going to be in a place called Carriageworks and is facilitated by an organisation named Semi-Permanent, both of whom appear sufficiently confident and/or deluded that letting me do what I want is in some way a good idea. And in the very centre of this Panic Office will be a Shrine of Bear, a room devoted to the pointy-toothed bear that has become either my trademark or the cartoon albatross that circles my derelict ship as it idles endlessly in the Doldrums.
Anyway, it’s your turn now. I want you to send me photographs of your drawings of The Bear. I want photographs of your Bear cakes, your Bear teddy bears, Bear ear-rings, Bear suits, Bear sushi, Bear tattoos – anything Bear – and I’ll print it out and attach it to the interior of the Shrine of Bear.
Here’s the address: stanleydonwood@semipermanent.com
If you’d like an idea of how I want the Shrine to look, try typing ‘stalker shrine’ into a reputable search engine. You’ll see.
Ok, right, I’m off to cry about the political situation in my home country.