Leanne Shapton on playing in a field of pylons as a child

I grew up in a suburb of Toronto called Mississauga, and there was a… our backyard backed onto a big field. And it was sort of a park. And the soccer field portion of it was directly behind our house, but above the field were these power lines. You know, massive towers, massive steel towers and power lines. And something that my brother and I discovered about the soccer field were the soccer posts, would spark when we touched the metal part of them and would hum. Like they would always be humming and vibrating. So that gave this park kind of this um, actually the field a sort of interesting atmosphere. And I probably walked through the field to and from school, every day, you know once a day. There was a little hill we would toboggan on, and one time after it rained there was a thick fog over the field. And my dad gave us fluorescent tubing rods for fluorescent lights and he said, “go out into the field now.” And we went out into the field holding these fluorescent tubes and they lit up, and… I guess from the ions in the air from the pow… I have no idea how my dad knew this would happen. But they lit up like lightsabers, it was around the sort of “Star Wars” time. And uh, Derek and I just lost our minds with joy running around the field in this thick fog with lightsabers. And in my memory there is this hum still coming from the soccer posts, and so that’s a very vivid and happy and dreamlike memory I have of that field.