MARKS ON ANYTHING/MARQUE SUR TOUTES SURFACES/MARKIERT ALLES/MARCA TODO

https://marksonanything.bigcartel.com/

Retrospectively I’ve tread on similar ideas in other lifetimes, I’ve gone days thinking about canals and bridges and murderers. About my safety, about the nationalist inside me that trusts absolutely no one. In the south I’ve felt closer to you than ever. Ugly letters were covered and scratched out, wiped over and rewritten, over and over, until the layers came together and fossilised into wet concrete. The solstice re-emerges again, religiously at the pier. I’ve never flipped and neither have you. After a party I ubered to the point Ormond hill but I couldn’t see the aurora lights. I had a green marker on me but I didn’t use it.

A lover once showed me a feeling of vitality at the baths, where you steam, then run into the ocean water and then go back to the sauna. Yeah, like to shock your system but also because it’s good to do things in threes. 1. in the attic of the theatre I’ve kissed someone, 2. at the botanical chessboard I’ve kissed, 3. Some canal bench. Sometimes at the station when I said goodbye although it never felt meaningful. 1.I sat at a petrol station curb and wrote his name with a sharpie on the ground below me, 2.I wrote our names in the botang tree obviously, 3. in the alleyway behind my parent’s apartment. A long time was spent around the beach, I wrote his name there too in the sand. I never wrote my name but that’s because I was self unaware. 

I have found similar scribblings in reddit streams, texts from men who are afraid to leave their rooms, who feel like they need the world to know what they are thinking. These marks are extroverted measurements of sustained relationships with the world, but rather than sinking into life they are new-worldmaxxing. These words, numbers and symbols are evidence of excess. 

The microstate of the south is a fever dream, people here have a halo/horn bias the deeper you get. When the swamp that once covered Elwood rises every full moon I feel the drops of comfort again and I recoil back into my lizard state at my parent’s house. 

The writing on the toilet walls told me I was pretty and that I should always use condoms, 

Someone also wrote: 

I AM THAT I AM

I AM GOD

I AM HERE NOW 

It reminded me of a sign that once said:

No god 

No peace

Know god 

Know peace 

Don’t overthink it, I'm a fool by nature, my Texas hold em hand was right all along. The betting machines were against me, as were you. As if bricks could replace the drywall behind the pokies, I’d love you even more. After Christmas lunch, I gravitated towards the Ghenkis Khan pokie machine with $10, it felt prophetic and I walked away with $70. Around me were some graffers, although at the time I didn’t know. They were cute but I felt cuter. I don’t kick on. 

There is no chance of a career in the archives of God’s memory. Groys also once said, 

Iconoclasm’s purpose is to prove that the old gods have lost their power and are subsequently no longer able to defend their earthly temples and images. 

Sometimes I see the museological aspect of these scribbles, their potential, as we now see, documented and submitted. Last night I trailed behind a group of boys, they went around random alleyways in the city, I loved it all from behind. I’ll never be one of the boys, and that’s whatever, I like my tits too much anyway. I feel like I can finally breathe when I’m around them. They’re all dumb because they don’t realise that they can shove and yell at me as well, I’m not delicate at all.  

The sincerity of these writings and marks come from a place of total abandonment. This collection of photos reflect both the deeper layers behind intoxication and just pure reason. Photographing these interpersonal thoughts displays more than just empathy but upturned/uprooted feelings. Marks on Anything, marked me and when I sharpied words on my hand so much that my whole hand turned black. 

I’ve wasted a few lives recently. Uprooted my soul and showed it to too many people. 

I’ll think about his name tattooed on my foot and I’ll think briefly about the many options I had before I opted out. I think about how my kleptomania goes crazy when I’m on my period. I strictly graff alone. But it all feels too safe to understand the real cause of my restlessness. Now it’s my rebound hobby and I feel sick because of it. 

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As part of an ongoing project; documenting the scrawls left throughout St Kilda, MARKS ON ANYTHING is 118 pages of photographs taken between 2019 and 2024 by Cosmo Feltham and Spencer Findlay. Featuring writing from Maggie Kontev and Rory M as well as paintings by Daniel Burke Broderick and Spencer Findlay.

A5
118 pages
Perfect bound
Limited to 50 copies
Published by Spencer Findlay

preorder: https://marksonanything.bigcartel.com/