Everything’s bigger in America

5 February 2023

Bryan Adams and Meatloaf suddenly make more sense when you’re actually working in a big warehouse with real american guys and power tools. It doesn’t seem so cliched or inauthentic when you’re surrounded by the same accents and the same big-ness that come across in these epic anthems about desire and manly, chivalrous love.

‘Everything’s bigger in America’ - this saying is true – big cars, big meals, big pianos, big skies, big roads… and big problems. But it turns out that they have a saying here which is similar – and demonstrates beautifully the relative nature of our sense of scale. The saying here is ‘Everything’s bigger in Texas’.

The use of single-use plastic is rife here – I thought we had it bad at home, but here it’s just silly. Coffee machine pods, bottled water at every turn, wine bottles wrapped in two plastic bags by the guy at the till. I told him we have to pay for plastic bags in Scotland. I don’t think it really registered. He was impressed to learn that I was here to build an art project. ‘You must be stacked’, ‘they payin’ for your flights to get over here an everything’? At first I was at pains to say that no, actually I wasn’t getting paid a huge amount for it, but really what it came down to in the end was that I am being paid to do something that I want to do, and love to do – in that way I am stacked. I guess that’s kind of what he meant. And relatively maybe I really am stacked.