ANDY WEBSTER
Almost everyone who has played football has experienced this moment—a wayward shot sails over the fence, seemingly lost for good. Unless another player retrieves the ball, the game ends abruptly in disappointment. Along a north-London river, called the Dollis Brook, at least 98 such moments, certainly more, had accumulated, waiting to be discovered.
Crazy Tourist documents a single-day expedition where the artist and collaborator, Jon Bird, both football fans with their own stories of errant shots, walked the length of Dollis Brook in search of these lost footballs. Each ball found told the story of a game cut short—somewhere upstream. The search itself became the work's guiding constraint, shaping how they encountered the river environment and prompting conversations about these everyday accidents of play. The 98 collected footballs are displayed scattered across the gallery floor, transformed from discarded objects into a poetic archive of seemingly mundane losses.
The work was a collaboration with Jon Bird and was first shown at the Waterfront Gallery, University of Suffolk, Ipswich (2013)