Photo: Erik Williamson
Here be Dragons
- 1500 x 750 mm: approx 10 kg
- Screen print on ultra-reflective film on aluminium
- Limited edition of 100
- Labelled, number-stamped & signed
- Mounted on 25 mm rails, rigged & ready for easy hanging
- Weatherproof—safe to hang outside
- Can be securely anchored to wall or post
- Securely packaged for safe delivery/storage
- In production early 2011
Price
- $TBC
Approx. $2000
Please email if you’d like an update.
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Once upon a time, I was reading an interview in Dumbo Feather with one of my favourite Australian writers—Luke Davies (Candy, Isabelle the Navigator, God of Speed).
As Dumbo Feather often does, it surveyed its subject’s place—in this case, the far-from-home writer’s temporary desk and makeshift writing space. One of the items uncovered was detailed as follows …
Dragon
There’s the wonderful Paolo Uccello painting “Saint Georges and the Dragon” which is at the amazing, small Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris … For some reason it’s just been one of those pictures I want regularly hanging wherever I go this year. I guess because I have been in such unknown territory, it feels like there could be dragons around.
Dumbo Feather, issue 15, Autumn 2008.
This got me thinking about dragons. Well, first it got me reading God of Speed, which had just come out. But all the while I was thinking about dragons, which are probably a pretty good meditative metaphor to have while reading an imagined memoir of Howard Hughes.
I can’t profess to know much about dragons, nor to have thought about them much before this. I never played Dungeons and Dragons as a kid. However, I do recall a cryptic line from an obscure Yazoo song from the 80s:
Dragons, the policeman knew, were supposed to breathe fire, and occasionally get themselves slaughtered.
“I Before E Except after C”, Vince Clarke/Yazoo, Upstairs at Eric’s, 1982.
And I’ve always loved the line “here be dragons”—a phrase used by cartographers of yore to denote lands and waters known to be dangerous, or simply those uncharted and unknown. (The unknown/unfamiliar or foreign/alien being conceivably more dangerous than any perceivable danger.) The dragons warning also came to be employed by those procuring and publishing maps to keep the masses away from certain places they wanted to keep private, secret, for themselves.
So dragons, it would appear—from what little evidence we have—are pretty hostile and dangerous creatures. And, like sharks and crocs, are probably best avoided. But, then—like the threat of terrorists, the Y2K bug, Mad Cow Disease, spontaneous human combustion, the yellow peril, the red scare, UFOs, ghosts, bunyips, astrology, scientology, various gods and so on—I’m not entirely sure dragons exist unless we think they do, so we probably don’t need to worry.
The Dragons Sign is a logical extension of the Not Sign, which sprang from the lusty loins of the Love Sign.