N.O.Y
('Roses Don't Grow On A sailor's Grave'/'A Trainline To An Ocean')

It seems possible to identify the two poles Tom Moore's work resonates between;
on the one hand, the black line drawing cartoons mapping some conceptual
point. On the other the grubby messy everyday of a rubbed threadbare, sincerely
lived life in the punk rock mould:  The clean cut lines of his digital mapping
of this project; exhibited as the collaboratory piece, 'A Train Line To An Ocean'
on one side and the bumbling, dropped packs of cards and second hand, mismatched
portable stereos of its physical manifestation, 'Roses Don't Grow on a Sailor's
Grave' on the other, are the points at which this work begins.  It is the space;
actual and conceptual, public and personal, formal and otherwise that is constructed
between them and the lines traversing it where it is played out.

While writing I listen to a CD Moore gave me.  On it is stamped the words 'nothing
ever happens'.  This is the song that is playing.  An eighties' punk voice is
singing, 'heaven is a place where nothing ever happens'.  Tom did tell me the name
of the band but i don't remember it.  There is only this one song on the cd.  Tom
moore has played me a great many songs in the four and a half years i've known him.
I find myself deliberately listening to it now, as i sit down to write about his work,
because the cd has sat gathering dust for the two weeks since he gave it to me and
all the other participants after his performance of 'Roses Don't Grow on a Sailor's
Grave' and i figured i'll do him a favour and kill two birds with one stone.  Maybe
albatrosses, but thats bad luck.  For sailors.  Apparently I have to listen to it
to complete the work.  This is the first time I've done so.  'Play it all night long',
i notice the punk is singing as i play the song for the second time. Slowly, as always,
i start to take Tom's point. Tom is always drawing things to my attention, by which
I mean 'drawing' in as many senses of the word as I can.  This time the gesture is
so formalised that it seems to link completely his working practice to his always
everyday commitment to it.  All the times Tom has insisted I listen to a particular
song for a particular reason this was what he was doing.  But this is embedded, firmly
and concretely in the abstract choreography of his work as much as it is embedded in
the way he navigates his day by day.  I see Tom as a sailor for a moment and another
connection is made.  I would describe them to you, these gradual understandings, but
I suspect that kind of academic dissection might detract a little.  How could I describe
the way that nothing ever happens forever in heaven is like the sea and like those eery
repeating bars of Paul Oakenfold and the random drawing of those cards without reducing
this to the in-jokiness and kitsch it so deftly avoids? I press play again.  Three times
now.  If nothing ever happens (still) does it happen for ever? Those punks all love
'nothing' so much. Those Paul Oakenfold loving ravers all love everything so much.  And
somewhere between them, in a church hall of all places, a bunch of raggle taggle boho
friends, fellow students and parents play out some kind of invocation to them all.

'Roses Don't Grow...' is one of an increasing number of Moore's forays into the formal
minefield inhabited by 'performance artists'.  My initial reaction to these works of his
(see also, 'My Grandad Was A Crazy Sailor') is often, before actually witnessing them,
one of indifference to what can appear a cryptic and impenetrable semiotic mess of
references to obscure pop culture and abstract gestures.  There is a temptation to avoid
the difficulty they present by dismissing as meaningless postmodern stumblings these
teenager-ish clutchings at meaning.  I find that during an actual experience of them
however, sympathetic and enthusiastic participation (difficult to avoid in the face of
Moore's playful compering) is rewarded by a small multitude of comforting and surprising
moments of engaging familiarity, by humour leading gradually to a clarity accompanied by
delight, a feeling of discovery and a disorientating but exciting immersion in the
structures and systems the work is made to inhabit.  This is a Peter Pan-ish practice
that refuses to grow up while continuing to learn from experience, a piratical hoarding
of unlikely treasures.