I chanced upon Gavin earlier this year at an open studio event in East London, having met and worked with Gavin and his partner before it was a pleasant surprise to see them, setting up their armistice tea party stall. I puzzled upon the full reasons for their presence. The day was long and was initiated by a discussion with Gavin about recent events and how things had been, remembering I had worked with homeless people in the past Gavin started a conversation about a recent piece he had produced - a homeless person in a sleeping bag, made in bronze. Panic images flashed through my head - visioning his past work such as Pop 1993 I feared a scarily detailed dishevelled person set about with a laymen's perspective of homelessness, the dirty, the lazy, the mad, the drunk and the drugged.

We talked as we walked and Gavin suggested I come to the private view in Walsall, an event I sadly missed. He told me of how he had placed the piece in doorways around Charing Cross. Having worked with young homeless in that area and being aware of the hostility they receive I wondered whether the piece was left out all night, smirking at the vision of drunken urbanite's returning home from a night out with broken toes - I wonder.

Nomad plays with ambiguity perfectly - claiming a space within the city and joining the urban community. It portrays a role for the need for shelter, for those who, for what ever reason, are compelled to live a nomadic life in the urban environment, it addresses the specific limitations and compromises imposed by this existence. The focus is the strategy of survival that urban nomads currently utilize - anonymous, unnoticed, covert and passed by. It was this very fact that Gavin revelled in when telling of how nobody noticed the piece when outside - they did, they just chose not to realise what it means.

Without sounding overly political, or critical of the status quo, the visible street (rough) sleepers are reducing in number, be that by the disproportionate government street counts, the use of zero tolerance in tourist boroughs such as Westminister, to the herding of people as objects into dormitory and transitional shelters. Some of these are extremely unfriendly places, but undeniably positive changes have been made. The evicted people we see seem so far removed from our own reality, our security. Most we do not approach through fear or ignorance, but this is not a call to question strangers, more for an understanding of the plethora of reasons that may have taken an individual to this point. As we all know, house prices are soaring above the national annual earnings, repossession is expected to rise and "a job for life" is a thing of the past, all this without touching on domestic or abusive reasons. In situations like this, and which Gavin's work is representative of, it pays to see not just the object but the bigger picture, which brings to mind a poem to close which I thinks suits -

I dream of a house, a low house with high
Windows, three worn steps, smooth and green

A poor secret house, as in an old print,
That only lives in me, where sometimes I return
To sit down and forget the gray day and the rain.

Andre Lafon 1913

- sleep tight.

Fred James
August 2002