Burn Lost Soul

Yesterday, while standing at the kitchen sink drinking a glass of water and looking out of the window into the alleyway, I saw a woman standing beside a shopping trolley full of bottles and broken furniture and overstuffed bin liners.
She was wearing an orange crocheted beanie, a faux-leopard print top, a necklace made of tiny copper tubes and green plastic beads, battered trainers that were too big for her, and she was slowly lifting to her lips, and then drinking from, a brown bottle.
I could only see half of the label, which said 'Ice', and which I imagined to be be a cheap and vicious form of alcohol.

A few minutes later when I left my house to get on my bicycle, I saw the woman in the street in front of my house.
A piece of paper on which I had written the word 'FREE' had blown into the gutter and the woman was bending to pick it up.
'I'll get that,' I called out to her, thinking that if I didn't the woman was going to fall drunkenly on her face on the road.
The woman slowly stood up and I put the piece of paper back on the pile of 'FREE' picture frames that I had left in the street.
'Where you from?' the woman said to me, 'You from Australia?'
'Yes,' I said, 'good guess,'
'I had a lawyer once,' she said, 'who was from Australia,'
'Oh, right,' I said.
Then, as she tried to remove a poster from one of the frames, she began to tell me about her time in court.

I couldn't understand much of what she said because she was drunk, so while I listened I began to notice how physically damaged she was.
She was hunched over and her fingers were buckled.
Because of the hunch I could see right through the orange beanie onto her scalp where a big white bandage was stuck.
Leading out from under the bandage was a raised gash that came down across her forehead, like a small mountain range.
It was slightly opened and I could see blood in it, and was reminded of a volcano.
The woman could not stand fully upright and her knees were scabbed, as if she had fallen a lot.
The woman was still talking when I interrupted her and told her I would remove the picture for her.
I took the picture out of the broken frame and gave her an unbroken frame to go with her new picture. 'God bless you,' she told me, 'and you have a good day,'
And then I told her the same thing back, leaving out the part about God.

The image above is Burn Lost Soul.
This is a special limited edition piece, so get in touch for a print.

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