25th June 2008 – The Invisible Garden

Here, the topiary – the heart stabbed through with the cross, like a sailor’s tattoo – and the ghostly shapes of Geese gone by…

 

And how we can’t tell where the Invisible Gardener’s work ends and the INVISIBLE GARDEN just happens – how we have to get out of the way and serve it and let it transform itself through us and us in the process…

 

On the afternoon of 17^th June 2008, John Crow showed Jimmy Cauty and Z. aka Mrs Redcross around the Invisible Garden. 2 JCs and a Z. Crow had come upon them flyposting Cauty’s Geese and Bones poster on the wall of the former burial ground.  Jimmy especially liked Crow’s Shrine for Dangerous Helpers with its broken gin bottle and cigar tin, its black feathers, its hairy patron Saint of Addicts and verses giving thanks for being set ‘free from mental slavery’.

 

Later, in the walled garden of the Ragged School, over tea and mango tart home-baked by Mrs R., they discuss how artists might contribute works to help establish Cross Bones as a site both of historical and living cultural importance, to save it from destruction by developers. J Crow urges J Cauty to become the Cross Bones icon painter. J Cauty says: ‘We should get BANKSY to do something on the concrete and tarmac, so they can’t dig up the bones without destroying his work.’

 

How John Crow – urban shaman and showman, The Bard of Southwark, servant of The Goose and curator of her Cross Bones Graveyard – came to be showing Jimmy Cauty – iconoclastic iconographer, co-founder of KLF, the artist who burnt a million quid – around this post-medieval prostitute’s cemetery in the heart of London…

 

is but a small part of the story at the very heart of all the stories to be told here, as you shall hear.