Shanice Gale
| Bio Statement | I stepped onto cold English stone in the late forties and never left. Those early years still echo in my bones. One fact I learned the rough way: a storage trunk is more than a box. On the voyage that bent time in half, we packed a life into one chest. Belgium steel rolled strong and stubborn. The latches gripped like teeth. Some folks don’t understand, those trunks earned their weight. Every dent was a port. Those scenes were true, smithers of stamford not costume. I made a small home in Brixton, and it waited like an old friend. Photographs, certificates, little papers: the trunk hid them when I needed quiet. The past turned its head and grinned. Once a year the tents rose overnight and changed the air, and the posters glued to walls promised elephants, fire breathers, acrobats — and always clowns. You could feel it before you saw it. Crews shouted across the field, and a tang of rope and canvas drifted everywhere. It was chaos and colour and a kind of magic. I found another trunk in those years, and I just stared. Across the front was a hand-drawn clown, upside down. It was more than paint. It carried the hush of a different age. Not just timber and iron, a splinter of that wandering life. The old workshop where I keep it still hums. I imagine it wedged between crates, stuffed with costumes and props, quiet until the band kicked. Every dent and scrape whisper of muddy fields and midnight load-outs. You can almost hear the locks click. And then a new mirror smithers of stamford landed in my lap. I saw a poster on ArtStation, and it showed a clown suitcase storage trunk that matched mine. For a heartbeat I was two people in two rooms. The odd inversion, the softened edges of age all felt uncanny. I half-believed the artist had stood where I stood. Poster to panel, glare to patina: the echo landed in the same room. People now call trunks storage, though they were the way people travelled. They were built heavy and honest. Thick boards, stout hinges, stubborn locks. Some carried names, routes, and crests. Inside is more than capacity, you meet a timeline with edges. Latch it and it holds the temperature smithers of stamford memory. I spot travel chests in Hackney lofts and Mayfair halls. Turn them into a TV stand. Some call it retro, but I call it earned. A trunk keeps its place in the room. If you step into a shop and see one, don’t turn your nose at the scar. Take home the box that understands time, and let it carry you too. Sometimes the dock and the big top shake hands. One knew kettledrums. I count the screws and thank the hands. They don’t compete, but together they make a chord. That’s how history breathes: in the patience of a latch. I’ve earned my living with things that outlast moods. Sometimes I think it leaks from one thing to the next. When I name the dents, I’m reading the minutes of a meeting. Windrush to ringmaster, the stitch looks rough but it will not part. So I leave them where I can see them, and I talk to them without speaking. Timber settles. And every time I pass, the upside-down clown catches my eye, as if asking when the tents go up again. And when I can smell rain in old mortar, I think I hear my trunk breathe, and I repeat the truth one more time: a trunk holds a life. |
INDEXING JOURNAL:
