I’ve literally just come out of that exhibition and I feel like I’ve got rust under my skin.

Not in a bad way. More like the work has made my nervous system feel architectural. Like I’m walking around with scaffolding inside me, and all of it is slightly bent.

There was this piece — this collapsed internal architecture, basically — and it wasn’t beautiful in the clean, decorative sense. It was beautiful like evidence is beautiful. Fractured ceramic planes cutting through corroded steel, wires stretched across the surface as if they were trying to persuade the whole thing not to fall apart. But they weren’t fixing it. That was the point. They were just holding incompatibility in place.

And I kept thinking: that’s what we do, isn’t it? Politically, emotionally, ecologically. We keep tensioning wire around systems that have already failed and then call it stability.

The burned textures felt like memory under heat. The cloth was distressed, almost bodily, but trapped inside all this industrial hardness. The oxidized layers were like time becoming material. Nothing resolved. Nothing healed. It just resisted dissolution.

I loved that. I mean, hated it, obviously, because it felt completely accurate.

It made me think about climate grief without ever illustrating climate grief. No melting ice caps, no dead trees, no slogan. Just matter under pressure. Containment fatigue. A system still standing, but only because collapse has become part of its structure.

I came out thinking: maybe that’s why I vote Green, honestly. Not because I think purity is possible — God, no — but because I don’t want to keep mistaking damage management for repair.

Anyway. I need a coffee. Or a cigarette. But I don’t smoke, because apparently I’m still trying to have principles.