Week one
The first of ten workshops at the Lightbox started with none of the technical stuff working. My laptop (with PowerPoint slide show) refused to talk to the gallery’s projector; transferring the PowerPoint to their laptop didn’t work either and finally running upstairs to the conference room with the PowerPoint on a memory stick to play through yet another computer set up to its own projector, didn’t work.
After that things went fine!
The group of children from the Lightbox’s resident ‘Junior Art School’ were great, friendly and interested. The increasing numbers of people drafted-in to help with the non-communicative technology were also great, friendly and interested and more importantly, unflappable. I have to confess to being in a teeny-weeny flap myself (!) but that soon passed as we got down to industriously making paper after having peered at the rather reduced slide show on laptop screens.
There is something very calming about papermaking, maybe its to do with being up to your elbows in porridgy liquid. Anyway the purpose of these workshops is to involve the group and as many other people from the Lightbox as possible, in making some contributions towards a piece of work for the exhibition and also to have some fun in the process.
My own work in relation to the project is growing almost organically. I’m finding it interesting revisiting some older territory in terms of material and content but with different ideas about scale and form.
