I'm taken with novelty.

An old, iron doorhandle, found at long abandoned dump in rural England;

Heavy
Rusted
Entry
Exit
No longer attached to a door
Falling off, trapped
Old
Abandoned
Used as a weapon



Exit

Flickering exit signs in a long, abandoned hallway cast a strange contrast to the old redwood doors and long, cast-iron doorhandles. Countless doors with countless doorhandles, each leading to different offices; lawyers, doctors, businessmen, young professionals. A building twice as old as the sum age of its inhabitants.


12 years at school to spend three years at university. Getting a degree to gain internship. Internship to gain employment. Employment to pay for food, petrol, rent. Half a life spent chasing a climax, preparing for the eventual decline.





Falling off, trapped

The doorhandle is the best means of escape from a room. The only means of escape from a windowless room. Without a doorhandle exiting the room is made significantly more difficult, sometimes impossible.


A doorhandle once fell off the door of a room I was in; maybe a toilet or bathroom. The kind of room where the windows are high up and almost inaccessible. You feel a new kind of helplessness when your general means of exit from a room is denied. You start to deconstruct your actions leading up to that point and try to figure out what you could have done to change the situation you are now in. After failing to re-attach it, you just start hitting the door and yelling for help.




No longer attached to a door

A doorhandle not attached to a door raises a series of questions; what kind of door was it attached to? Where did it lead? Why is it no longer attached to the door? Where is the door now? Any number of events could lead to the extraction of a handle from a door, some of which could have actually been caused by the handle itself. Drug bust? Demolition? Decomposition? Someone stealing handles with the intention to melt them down and create a sculpture, only to find that the melting point of iron is really hot, and with access to only a gas stove, eventually giving up on the project?




Rusted

Rust on a doorhandle is akin to wrinkles on a human. Wrinkles are a superficial sign of age that often denotes wisdom.


More and more as we progress technologically, and medically, people are delaying the body’s natural progression to deny the connotations that being an old person brings. What makes the wrath and disconcerting looks of young, wrinkle-less people more important than that of the old, wrinkled people?




Used as a weapon


A pillowcase full of doorhandles can be a dangerous thing.



Flickering

Somewhere between on and off. Light and dark. Good and evil. Lights that cannot decide if they want to go on, or give up. Minds that struggle with the same concept.




Escape

Which attributes of a person’s exit from a place or room are considered when defining it an ‘escape’? Does a situation have to be inherently dangerous before opting out of it is considered an escape? Is it the haste with which the exit takes place? If you crawl away from imminent danger is your escape considered less viable than if you fly away in a helicopter? Is it the belief that for some reason this particular exit is more important than others?