Old Father Live Forever, Medium format colour slide transparency, 2010.

Old Father Live Forever, video stills.

...It is everything its name promised. Stoic, uncompromising, haggard, and working its way down the arid slope with the single-mindedness of a paraplegic eyeballing a window sill cherry pie...



The video Old Father Live Forever takes its name from a pelargonium species endemic to St Helena.
Acting as the document of a performance to camera, staged in the south side of Mile End park in east London, a white trousered male urinates on a photographic transparency of the plant, punctuating a slow scenic pan that loops back and forth. This is accompanied by a recited text, the content of which ranges in subject from the cultivation of the plant in Mile End in the mid 18th century, to the British Nationality Act of the 1980s; frozen Inuit salmon torpedoes; NASA and the Boy Scouts; and Napoleon watering his garden. 


HD video, duration 20:40mins, 2010

Voice and urination by Emmett Walsh, filming by Millie Harvey, editing by Patricia Valencia, sound recording (and additional voice) by Peter Charles Havard.

Screened in an altered version at Saltwater, The Tall Ship, Glasgow International Festival of Art 2010.


Old Father Live Forever.pdf Old Father Live Forever.pdf
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