We roamed Sydney's streets at night looking for paint. Dulux spills, accidental, left behind by someone who did not stop. White pools flattened into the bitumen. Bleached stains on tar. We found them in Chippendale, in roundabouts, at intersections, on roads no one walks. When we found one we lay down in it. Face down, bodies flat, headlights the only light source. The cars became our audience. They drove past, unaware or briefly curious, slowing just enough before carrying on.

The spills were absurd and they were everywhere. Someone's accident, someone's mess, left to bleach under weather and tyres. We photographed ourselves inside them. We covered our faces with clothing, with plastic bags, with whatever was there. We sat in the middle of roundabouts. We performed for no one and everyone who happened to pass through.

The paint is Dulux. Hospital white. Gallery white. The white of sterility, of the picture rail, of do not touch. Spilt on the road it becomes something else. It stains the tar, the tar that was laid over ground that was not always road, ground that was something before it was infrastructure. The bitumen is never read as destruction. It is read as progress, as liberation through technology, as connection. A plastic node structure, ever growing.

But culturally we cannot place the waste of its transportation. The spill is teleported onto the surface of the road and it sits there, unresolved. Litter fills the moral dilemma. We need the white walls. We need the hospitals. We need the picture hung, do not touch, keep your distance. The gallery asks for the same composure the road does. Stay in your lane. Follow the line. Do not stop unless told to.

The absurdness becomes the performance. Two bodies lying in paint at midnight on a public road. No permission, no audience, no stage. Just the headlights, the tar, the spill, and whatever discomfort the drivers felt as they passed something they could not immediately categorise. The happening was the accident. The accident was already there. We just showed up and lay in it.

Thrills and Spills / Melletios Kyriakidis + James Gulliver Hancock
The Wedding Circle, Chippendale, 2011 / 351 Inc.