I wrote a book alongside the Crushing Snails project, all about the complex themes of love, life and creativity, explored through the analogy of a snail. Crushing Snails was an evolving project with a little bit of art, photography, film, writing and music. The book was based on the principle that we are all capable of being creative. It doesn’t matter whether we think our creativity is any ‘good’ in the eyes of others, it has a value to ourselves. It doesn’t matter whether we create a picture, a story or even a new way of doing something; being creative has an effect upon our well-being.
To demonstrate this, I built papier-mâché snails that travelled around the world with various different adventurers. There is a digest of their travels as they get passed from person to person, location to location. You can find it here. The snails are part of a story that takes place within a film. There were various different types of snail created for these journeys. Three types are out there in existence somewhere:
THE ORIGNALS
The Originals were created out of old overdraft penalty letters that the bank used to send me as a student and a freelance filmmaker! A group of trusty friends got together and helped me paint them all kinds of wild different designs that would distinguish the snails when they travelled!
THE CANARY SQUADRON
The Canary Squadron were the second batch of snails, this time made of newspaper, which made them lighter. They were painted with an undercoat of yellow poster paint, which is why they were called the Canary Squadron. They were tagged with a QR sticker which lead people to the website if they had a smart phone. The Canary Squadron were dropped off in various locations of Birmingham.
THE CRIMSON TIDE
The third batch were ordinary paper with red poster paint undercoat. The different colours are to distinguish where they have originated from. They were decorated by a team of French couchsurfers living in Dublin and then dropped around the city centre.
You can get a copy of the book here.