This is the first of two artist's posts, dealing with geographies and the idea of travel and navigation through the use of text, linquistic displacement, and appropriation.

From Robert Gibbings’ 1941 book “Sweet Thames Run Softly” (Readers Union Ltd., London, 1941. pp112-113) a home-made boat based self-illustrated account of a drift down that river. The author reaches Reading, Berkshire

BY ROBERT KNOWLES



“I would have made a drawing myself of this whole group of buildings, but for my innate laziness, which concocted the excuse that the sun was in the wrong position…After Mapledurham the face of the country is blemished with the marks of man, and if one cannot navigate that stretch of river by night the best alternative is a mild inebriation. I was unable to manage either, but I had the good fortune to synchronise my arrival in Reading with a river-steamer, and to watch the final acrobatics of four boys who had run a parallel course for several miles along the tow-path.

Their exhibition was the nearest thing that I have come across, in England, to that of the diving boys and other stray performers one sees in foreign parts. The four youngsters trotted along the tow-path as lightly as “terriers on their private excursions.” Suddenly one of them would let out a war-whoop. The next moment he would be executing a hand-stand on the shoulders of an accomplice, or balancing on his own head upon a gate post. After this, quite unconcernedly, he would break back into that easy trot that seemed to be his normal form of locomotion. A few minutes later one of the others would display. Then they would all combine in a knock-about turn. In between these diversions their pace on the tow-path never slackened. Breath seemed unnecessary to them.

When they reached the sanctified ground of the riverside park, their exhilaration and abandon increased, and they behaved with all the effrontery of merry andrews at a carnival, turning cartwheels among the astonished visitors, somersaulting over partly occupied seats, dancing on their hands, and performing other buffooneries. It was all as fresh and irresponsible as a ballet, and it happened in Reading. They collected no more than they deserved.”


Rob Knowles is an artist. Presently, he resides in Altrincham, Cheshire, England. For a period during his youth he was stalked by a bus.