I am a Gnome. I live in the bottom of a back garden. It might in fact be your garden. I can’t say. I don’t really know who lives here anymore. Sometimes, I do see people in the garden, through the leaves of the bush I’m in. I catch glimpses of faces, but I never seem to really remember any of them.
I do remember the people who put me here. They picked me up from a Dunelm in 2009. I remember the amusement on their faces when they saw me on my shelf with the other gnomes. They were a couple, middle aged. One of them, the man, must’ve been a fisher, like me, because his wife made a joke about his inability to grow a beard, like mine, or we might’ve been mistaken for each other. They brought me to the till, paid for me, put me in their car, drove me to my new home, put me in their well manicured garden, by a bed of chrysanthemums, and since then that is where I have stayed.
That wasn’t my first memory though, of course. My first memory was a sense of gradually dissipating warmth. This was the heat used to turn my constitutive material (polypropylene) molten, so it could be injected into a cast, that I then cooled in, becoming solid in my new gnome body. The more solid I became in this form, the more my consciousness came into focus, as I turned from inert material into a sentient archetype.
After this, I went through the finer details of my manufacturing process. My broad areas of colour were airbrushed, like my red hat and my blue overalls. My finer details, such as my eyes and shoe laces, were tampo printed. Different workers passed me along the production line until eventually I was packaged in polystyrene, along with thousands of other identical gnomes, packed and wrapped on a pallet, and stacked into a 40 foot container on a HGV. I assume that was what had happened at least, the polystyrene blocked my view.
It took a long time until I next saw something. Light surged through a seam in the packaging as it was finally opened on the shop floor of a Dunelm. My strange sensorily-deprived adolescence. It was the first stretch of time I spent stuck in stasis, but not the last. I rested on the shelf for a while, until I was taken to the couple’s home.
And that is where you’d find me now. In this resting place that has been mine for so long. Ostensibly, I have been fishing for the entire time. That’s the activity I convey sculpturally. But fishing is dynamic and probabilistic - you never know when you’re going to catch one. I have always caught one, in the past tense. I have never in fact, experienced catching one. In theory, it’s my only hobby, but I’ve never actually done it. I don’t think I would want to. The only experience of mine that brings me peace is rest. Leisure activities to me seem exhausting. Whether I have acclimatised to my stillness or I was created for it, I don’t know.
I do witness lots of change. Motion and energy is constantly shifting through the garden. I have seen so many plants establish themselves, grow and thrive, sometimes crowding out other plants or being strangled themselves. The people who come through the garden have been even more transitory, since the couple left. If I happen to recognise them, it’s rare that I see them again, and definitely never the next year. They move manically, and have little sense of place or home, it seems.
I have sat through a lot of seasons now, and seen a lot of change. I have changed lots too. I have weathered badly. Discoloured, stained, mottled by algae. I look older, less human, less like the folkish creature I resemble. I feel further from a gnome each day. I am disgusting and frozen. I will always exist and I know that. I have so much time. I just don’t know what to do with it all.