One can only push the limit of an artist trading card so far; it is meant to be 2 1/2 by 3 1/2 inches and more or less fit into a display sleeve. I have pushed the limits with things that unfold or pop up or were full’y fibre. When I indulge in using things gathered from streetcombing (the flotsam and jetsam that ‘washes’ up on city streets overnight) the liberties taken are major: last trading session I took along cards cut from a stack of roof shingles and attached large items such as a ghost pen that boxed, a flattened fork, dangling earring, expecting the unusual aspect of finding such interesting things would permit their inclusion.
This time I have had to come up with another means of ‘attachment’.
This time the list is going to be verbal and for the first time I am going to make numbered issues of the same card.
And for the first time I produce an artist trading card here: verbally.
Items ‘found’ (visually) on streetcombing adventure, October 2006
1/2 of a table top ironing board with the complete cover and padding
shaft of black umbrella – and – canopy, crushed with spokes splayed
(on road twelve yards apart)
man’s black glove, left hand, swollen with the rain
six inches of a do not enter police tape crumbled in the gutter by a drain amongst sodden leaves and trickling-away water
the silver part of a shopping cart that moves out of the way so carts can be stacked together in a grocery store
the rest of the shopping cart across the street
two cigarettes, about one-quarter smoked, still burning, side by side, on the sidewalk outside a restaurant