New Banksy street piece? An origami crane with a goldfish

On 20 March 2012 a set of photographs went up on Flickr showing a stencil nobody had seen before: an origami crane, folded from what looks like a single sheet of paper, holding a small goldfish in its beak. The photographer was the account known as The Lonely Villein, whose record for being first to a new Banksy is about as good as anyone’s. No address came with the pictures. Within hours the image was being passed around the street art blogs as the latest Banksy, and most of them assumed, on no particular evidence, that it was somewhere in London.

So is it his? The honest answer on day one is that it looks that way. There is no signature, which proves nothing either way, and it has not yet appeared on Banksy’s own website, which is the only confirmation that counts. What makes people confident is the craft. The crane is built from several layers, with the facets of the fold picked out in flat tones and a crisp drop shadow that lifts the bird off the wall. Folded paper is a hard thing to stencil convincingly, and this one reads as an object sitting in front of the wall rather than paint on it. That level of finish is not easy to fake.

A quieter piece than usual

What is unusual is the tone. Banksy’s best-known London walls tend to carry a joke with a political sting: the rats with placards, the girl reaching for her red balloon, the giant ONE NATION UNDER CCTV off Oxford Street. The crane has no slogan and no obvious target. The motif has meanings of its own, as a Japanese emblem of long life and, since the story of Sadako Sasaki and her thousand paper cranes after Hiroshima, of peace. Put a live fish in its beak and the paper bird turns predator, or perhaps a folded thing that has learnt to fish. It is open to reading, which is rare for him.

Where Banksy is now

The timing fits. Banksy’s last widely reported London piece, a shopper tumbling from a building with her trolley on Bruton Lane in Mayfair, turned up in late 2011. His pieces around Camden have been the subject of a long running feud with the writer King Robbo and his crew, a fight that Channel 4 turned into a documentary last summer. Meanwhile the film Exit Through the Gift Shop has made him better known than ever, which also means more copies and more hopefuls stencilling in his style. Every new piece now arrives with a question mark attached until the website settles it.

For now, a well-made crane, a fish and a photograph without an address. If it is where the blogs think it is, somebody in London will be walking past it this morning.

Since then the mystery has been cleared up: by the end of May 2012 the crane had appeared on Banksy’s own site and it turned out to be nowhere near London, on the side of a building by the River Lym in Lyme Regis, Dorset.