THE TRIALS OF LIFE!
My studio has been a place of life and death drama today.
For a couple of weeks now I have been planting runner beans, hoping to have a good number of them ready for our first project space residency at Phoenix Arts in July. I am amazed at the speed with which they have grown &, having been away from the studio for most of last week, have had to do some emergency "potting-on" today.
The first lot of beans are quite established now, but the latest crop have grown long and leggy in their fight towards the light of the studio window. So I decided to put them outside in the yard where they can enjoy some natural sunlight & fresh air … with disastrous consequences as they wilted rapidly in the baking afternoon sun! I brought them back in for some emergency water and a cool-off while I do some reading on how to grow successful beans and puzzle out how I'm going to make my beans grow the way I want them to for my installation.
MYSTERY SOLVED
Here is the full answer to the mystery of the polaroids: I bumped into Ken, the owner of the shed, some weeks ago and asked him about the photos. He works for a firm that used to export reproduction furniture to the United States. They took two photos of the items in each consignment, one for the buyer and one to keep as a document which they stuck on boards. When they stopped exporting, he used these boards to finish the shed.
OUTSIDE – IN
Today we walked along the seafront & went to say goodbye to Caroline Wright who was spending her last day at her gilded beach-hut as part of the Towner Offsite project, "Impossible Changeling". 10 gilded pebbles each day have been distributed along the stoney beach in Eastbourne, and today as we walked along the beach, I found one!
I brought it home and as I thought about how to photograph it for the blog, I realised how many other objects I have brought in from the outside from walks over the years.
Caroline says "Bringing a pebble home into our personal domestic environment affords it a status – separated from the crowd the single pebble becomes a treasured artifact." The gilded stone reminds me of the golden dragees given out at weddings and at Christmas. I put it in a leaf pattern bowl with some felted pebbles given to me by friend & artist, Solveigh Goett. She called her pebbles "Stones in Sheep's Clothing"
ANOTHER WISLEY MAGIC SEED PLANTED
I visited old friends Ginny and Colin in Lancaster yesterday and they had saved the souvenir seed I sent them to plant with me. They have an enormous well tended vegetable patch on their farm and took me to their bean patch. Here is Colin pushing in the marker.
Like Roz I have been thinking about the interchange between indoors and outdoors and considering our attempts to control and order our worlds. I have been working with leaves, this Bindweed leaf being one of them.
Soon, when Roz gets back from her trip, we will have a meeting and begin to plan how to approach our first project space in a month's time.
Yesterday I met fellow a-n blogger, Caroline Wright. It was great to see her on Eastbourne seafront at the opening of her Towner Offsite project, "Impossible Changeling". She has gilded the inside of an Eastbourne beach hut using gold leaf, and is distributing gold-leafed pebbles from her local beach in Aldeburgh, Suffolk onto Eastbourne beach.
