Danger at The Rag Factory

1 week to go!

I’ve been reading Beowulf, adapted by Penelope Hicks. I find it both funny and sad that after Grendel the monster is killed, they have to get past his mum. A she-monster. I could possibly do something with this, but maybe for something else.

On Tuesday I dropped in at Kate’s house, and we had a cup of tea and chatted about the exhibition. She was working on a scale drawing of the space, for planning purposes, which was rather impressive.

By Thursday, when I realised that it was 3 weeks to the day until the exhibition opens, I had started getting scared. I need things that move. Also something that plays sound, though not loudly. I intended for studio time to happen this weekend, but I ended up having the kind of weekend which didn’t allow for that. However, I have managed to get a clearer idea of what I’m doing for the show, and made some sketches of ideas, so that’s something at least.

Last night’s dream is possibly quite revealing. It involved being trapped in a studio building with various other artists and they were all either very intimidating or very annoying, or both. I was trying to get out of the building but the exit codes for the doors kept changing, and I could never remember which key I had to use.

Today I was over-seeing the painting of some scenery I’d designed for the Stevenage Lytton Youth Theatre production of adapted fairytales, called Once Upon A Time. I was very glad to have an excellent team of people keen to help with the painting, and it’s pretty much done now and, I must say, looking rather good. I had to take Maisie the springer spaniel with me today as she would have been home alone for too long otherwise. I don’t normally dare take her anywhere she might get into mischief, but I didn’t have much choice today. Luckily there were lots of people around who were kind enough to keep her entertained while the painting was going on. There was one point when I thought she’d eaten a large amount of chocolate (complete with foil wrapping), which belonged to one of the painting team, but it turned out to be a false alarm. I hope she didn’t annoy people too much. She certainly seems to have enjoyed the excursion, in any case.

I am plotting what to do about Danger. Specifically, an exhibition called Danger which will take place at the Rag Factory in Brick Lane (?) and which my friend Kate is curating. She has been kind enough to invite me to show some work at the exhibition, which I’m quite excited to do. The last time I exhibited in London happened to be in the same area, at the Truman Brewery, as part of Free Range 2008. This was something of a sequel to our degree show, and in my case I feel it rather suffered as a result, since I for one felt so drained by the degree show experience, and daunted by the idea of racing to put up another show, that I really didn’t make as much out of the Truman exhibition as I could have done. This time I intend to do better!

I’ve managed to spend a few hours in the Hertfordshire Central Resources Library this week – where I now want to live – the idea being to research what angle to look at the theme of ‘danger’ from. I’ve found a book called The Encyclopedia of Horror, which is mostly about the kind of horror film I most like, such as the old vampire/werewolf/zombie/monster ones. I’ve been thinking and writing notes on the different kinds of danger that exist, or don’t exist as the case may be, and dividing them into ‘everyday’ – e.g. tripping over a shoelace, ‘extreme’ – things like natural disasters or severe but plausible catastrophes, and ‘fictitious’ – the kind of things that only happen in films, etc. I like the idea of mixing these around, in some kind of narrative.

But I seem to keep coming back to the idea of eggs. They are what I seem to think of as the most at-risk of everyday objects. I’ve made a video about eggs before, as part of a showreel I made in my final year at uni, and which was included in my degree show:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZ5uVKCLCxw

I’d like to take it a bit further this time, and set up some live scenarios, based on horror/adventure narratives, for the eggs to attempt to deal with. I need to decide whether the eggs would be as they come (raw and potentially messy), blown and hollow, or re-filled with something else.