Tom Gooch

The Treehouse Manifesto: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bike is a fictionalised telling of my own cycle route from my home in Streatham Hill to White City – a journey I have made back and forth some 200 times. It is told through the context of a surreal and fantastical world that can only be entered when riding a bicycle; a world where the city is its own sentient, ever-changing entity that is the cyclist’s primary antagonist. This fictitious, surreal and highly intense world reflects my own opinion of cycling as a hyper-experiential activity that is so much more than simply getting from A to B.

The journey is presented through the context of the world with posters, knick-knacks, visual cues, back stories, and subplot, which I have created in a method not unlike world-building. This is to manifest the feeling that this world exists and keeps ticking over even when the audience isn’t looking – and the inclusion of the cyclist’s journey is almost coincidental, one of a million stories going on in the world, which the audience can pick out and follow through the piece. The work indulges my insatiable lust for 'Easter eggs' (of information, not chocolate) and paying attention to the small details.

This project is an extension of my dissertation (The Treehouse Manifesto), which was a vitally important exercise in self-exploration and discovery. It explicated how everything I draw now is essentially what I viewed as a perfect world as a child, and my relationship and obsession with this vision. My subsequent work has been directly influenced by this and is indebted to it, concerning how this obsession and vision has mapped itself onto cycling, and my highly temperamental love/hate relationship with my bike.