I had been feeling a little down about my residency in the Cloakroom. I wasn’t sure why but I was feeling less and less like going there. My avoidance tactics where beginning to seem thinner and thinner. Waiting in for the post, cleaning the bathroom, getting to the next level on Angry Birds. I couldn’t quite put my finger on my unwillingness until Annabel suggested making a list of all the things I had done.
Planted cress in the carpet – Health and Safety was alerted and a man was sent from the council offices in Endeavour House. He declared the cress unsafe and/or unhealthy and scheduled it for removal.Sat alone in the cloakroom watching Chinwe being fawned over by her acolytes.
Set up some cress growing in cars and caravans in the space. – Found I couldn’t get into the gallery because Chinwe was setting up her show, The door was locked, I could see activity through a crack but no one answered my knocking.Returned to find all the cress had dried and gone brittle, so I tidied up and decided to make a film of cress growing.
It was the day of Chinwe’s opening, I wanted to get in to tidy up my space and project a video. – Again
the door was shut while they photographed Chinwe’s show. – My room was dead and abandoned. I didn’t go to the private view.
Upstairs there was an exchange room. People could leave things on shelves where they were photographed, recorded and then exchanged for other objects by later visitors. Hayley Lock dropped off a beautiful collage and Annabel had left some porcelain sculptures. Annabel wanted to swap something with it Hayley’s collage, but I kept forgetting. When we eventually made it into the room, a school party had already been in. My girlfriend’s porcelain doll limbs had gone as had Hayley’s beautiful collage. In their place were: a rotten banana, a tissue, a bus ticket, a museum guide leaflet, a bruised apple, a paper clip and an Iraqi banknote. I took the note and my girlfriend left two cyanotypes she had made of plants from Darwin’s garden. I was left with a deeper understanding of entropy.
I had made a plastic sculpture using a magnetic building toy, it was growing out of the radiator, I had also made some fake lift controls out of cardboard and part of the Harrods magic box Annabel gave me for Christmas. They looked like a bad sci-fi control panel. I put them on the wall. – The plastic sculpture has been dismantled and piled in the centre of the room. The controls had been taken off the wall and left in a pile of cardboard rubble.
I put them all in a bin bag and took them away.
I tried growing cress in cut glass containers using a water retaining gel compound. – The heating was turned up and all the cress seed failed to germinate.
Tried again. – Got depressed and didn’t return to water it.
Decided to put this list up in the space.
