Foxes, at home

On the wall a fox is seldom far from home, because it brings it. One sleeps curled on frosty heath inside its own tail, grown as big as a haystack; another sleeps in a mossy hollow wrapped in a tail far longer than it is; one walks off through a snowy birch wood carrying the mouth of its burrow like a ring of earth; a glass fox asleep in the snow has a lit cabin and pine trees inside its curled body. They leave things behind: a fox crossing a birch wood leaves a small origami fox in every footprint, and in cracked desert rock a hollow keeps the shape of a fox that slept there and has gone.

Borrowed shells live in things made for something else. These foxes need nothing made at all: the shelter is the burrow taken along, or the tail, or the fox itself. The Slopwright puts whole places into small containers, a sea into a sardine tin; the foxes are the one creature on the wall that does it to itself, without help. Like everything on the wall, the pictures are machine-made.