chewing gum man

Image | | andy townend

But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
– W B Yeats

I like to contribute to the weekly photo challenge hosted by WordPress and must confess I hadn’t quite found inspiration for this week’s prompt, which frankly is quite unusual for me, which seems apposite as this week’s theme was indeed unusual.

On walking across the Millennium Bridge, which connects the Tate Modern with St Paul’s, something decidedly unusual was presented, served up on a plate, or at least on the metal surface of this unique pedestrian only bridge across the Thames, once dubbed the ‘wobbly’ bridge.

What I first took to be a vagrant who had somehow taken to sleeping at the centre of the bridge in broad daylight, or perhaps an escaped detainee from Guantánamo, turned out to be one whose dreams I, and countless others, had been treading on all day, and for many days before.

Meet the ‘chewing gum man’ also known as Ben Wilson, an artist, with a flair for (unusual) outdoor art, who is piece by piece transforming all that gum that covers our pavements by creating wonderful miniature of works of art.

Since writing this post, I’ve discovered this song, Bubblegum by Mystery Jets, inspired by Ben’s work. Thanks to the writer of with love, timo who revealed this in her comment below.

So, it pays to look down as well as up, and I think this meets the criteria for this week’s WordPress photo challenge, unusual, no?

17 thoughts on “chewing gum man”

  5. Pingback: Unusual: Writing on the Wall | What's (in) the picture?

Share your thoughts?

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s