Drug Bear

I love cheap, mass produced plastic animal figurines. The strange seams of leftover plastic that give them strange new limbs, their awkward painted on features, the manufacturers lack of concern for realistic proportions. Drug Bear is the perfect example. Despite being stocky and having a textured surface suggestive of fur, he resembles a chubby boy with short legs far more than any bear. He is looking to the left in such a way that I can only imagine he has seen something shocking across the road, but is too out of it to do anything about it. A seam clumsily bisects his face like an unfortunate scar.

Did someone paint features on Drug Bear? I try to picture the industrial areas of China where all the cheap plastic junk that clutters my life is produced. I am forever picturing the manufacture of things, I'm not content to just let them exist as objects. Seeing the imprints of dates and times on food packets, denoting time of packaging, I fall into short reveries. There must be hundreds of plastic animal factories. I picture giant vats in which the different coloured plastics are bubbling, before being injected into thousands of tiny moulds. Some of the figures have such subtle colouration, however, I am confounded by how they must have been made.

The Menagerie is lined up atop one of my filing cabinets, the one that Matthew gave me on permanent loan as long as I didn't cover it with girly stickers. It used to hold the records of retired or deceased railway workers, now it is host to all sorts of miscellaneous junk. For example one drawer is full of unopened packets of stockings from the 1970s. Another is host to a collection of information about the Borzoi. Right down the bottom is a selection of some of my hundreds of unmarked cassette tapes that I never listen to.

Lined on the top are a selection of plastic animals. Llamas, giraffes, dinosaurs, pigs, a snail, sheep – a remarkably wide selection of fauna is represented clumsily in plastic. Occasionally I rearrange the lines. I find it very soothing to line things up, sometimes I do it without realising, I'll stand up from a table and find objects I had been fiddling with in a neat row. Subconsciously I must strive for order.