Notes:
At the moment the delightful Culzean Castle is showing off a collection of marine themed woven willow sculptures. Naturally, I had to take a look. There’s a bit of information with each one — either little factlets in the case of real world subjects, or a drop of folklore for those of a more fictional disposition. Definitely go check them out if you can.
The kids and I had been chatting about dragons earlier in the day, so they were on my mind when I saw this chap. Clearly not a dragon, but it struck me that perhaps it would want to be. After all, who wouldn’t.
Consciousness flickered somewhere behind the wicker eyes. Not a lot. Just the tiniest seed of a dream of a thought. It would not take long, however, for that seed to grow. Staycations and outdoor spaces had been a must and so a steady flow of people had come and look. With so many minds wandering in flights of fancy it had only been a matter of time before one stuck. After that one, more notions accumulated and as they did, the gathering speeded up. Like gravity building a planet one mote of stardust at a time.
Summer heat accelerated the stream of minds until what had once been a mere structure — no more than willow and steel — nearly had a mind of its own. For days it was stuck in that ‘almost’ state. The minds that happened by were not enough to make the leap into life. There was nothing wrong with those minds. They had the capacity, but they were busy. Awash with thoughts of work and childcare and money and schedules, they had no room left for the sort of wakeful dreaming that was needed.
One day a girl came to visit the sculpture. She’d been before, in too much of a rush to stop and consider. Something had struck her about that particular sculpture. Like it was waiting. She settled on a nearby bench, took out her watercolours and sketch pad and started to paint. As was her way, she tried to put herself into the mind of her subject, tried to fathom what it would want, where it would go if only it could.
Pigment spread over paper. The girl fell into a rhythm: brushstroke, glance, brushstroke, glance. In the interval between glimpses, something changed.
“Thank you for waking me,” said the creature that wasn’t a sculpture any more.
Brandon Lim 