From the water damage archive: thinking about potential loss and how to best protect the raw materials for future work. With one hundred boxes now sorted and their contents catalogued, it’s time now to focus on making the garden shed as watertight as possible. The sewing needle box lids I’d collected took on a beauty of their own through becoming saturated, but I’m not going to take the risk with other objects. I lost some brilliant collage cuttings the last time there was a leak, some of which I’d held onto since bringing them back from the USA in 1989 – there’s nothing quite like the quality of those black & white images in vintage ‘Life’ magazines. I have no intention of letting anything else be ruined, and so it’s all eyes now on making the storage space as waterproof as it can possibly be. As such tasks continue to take me away from making work, I have to keep reminding myself: all this sorting, all this preparation – it’s all part of the process!
