rolling my dung, in four acts

taking stock in case I am confusing everyone:

I am working on:

'Dungbeetle and Sisyphus'

'Giants' for St Luke's, Liverpool

'Devotional Choreography' for Bridewell Gallery, Liverpool

and am working with Steve Boyland on a variation of Devotional Choreography "Khoreia".

And I am devising a new project based on Idioms.

Yes, it's a lot to co-ordinate and sometimes I feel fuzzy.

Now I have 7 huge stores collecting their cardboard for me..

It occurs to me that I could easily accumulate enough to build a warm shelter in which I could live when I move to London.

Tomorrow is a big cardboard collection day. I decided to collect a bulk load before starting the constructions.

So this thursday I will go down to London and spend a few days between galleries and friends. I have been barred from my usual habitat down there which makes the prospect of living in cardboard dwellings all the more tempting..

I am looking for an assistant to work with me from next week. On 4 long afternoons a week. (5-6 hour sessions) It would be acrazy amount of work to try and construct all of my cardboard hides/watchtowers on my own.

Listening to the theme tune of my teenage years: Tom Petty's "Learning to Fly"..

The progress today: I have been to several DIY shops, sellers of technological gadgetry and a bed-supplier. And all are enthusiastically promising to save all their corrugated cardboard for me to collect weekly until I have enough to build all 7 large forester's houses on stilts.. I struggle to explain them in English.

You will see soon..

The exhibition for St Luke's has now been confirmed for the 30th of May, I am trying to negotiate a starting date of 3-4 days earlier than that. But there is some time yet. But for now the dates will be 30th of May to 13th of June. Just 2 weeks, not 3 as I originally hoped. So much work and then just 2 weeks.. In future I will have to make sure to negotiate a certain effort to exhibition period ratio!!! But this is good. A solo show in the centre of Liverpool in a venue that is busy and accessible to all types and shapes and sizes of people.

Bingo!

I am inching my way closer to a clear view..

This weekend I attended Markus Sokoup's Binary Jam at the Static Gallery, which I arrived at really quite late, but still I think I deserve points for crawling out of the comforts of my warm home. It was good to see some locals (Sam from the View Two Gallery, Virgil Shakira who has made much experimental/abstract soundworks although he may hit me for probably mis-describing what exactly he does… Jay Yung who just closed her Paradise Stories at Riba, and a few others… Good to see them.

I went to hear Steve Boyland and Magie Nichols perform their improvised voice work at the Bluecoat on sunday. It was inspirational to see them work and encouraging to see such a strong audience.

As about my own progress: I have had a meeting with a friend who is practical and we worked out how I will construct my '7 Giants' in time for the exhibition in St.Luke's in Liverpool. I am looking forward to it now and am actually just about to to and get a few of the necessary materials and some advice from the DIY centre. (I am constructing all 7 "giants" out of corrugated cardboard, which I will laminate until I can make 2inch batons out of it for the legs of the giants and 1inch or so sheets for the sides… I promise a drawing soon to clear any confusion I am causing you…)

Hopefully tomorrow I will have a meeting with Ambrose from Urban Strawberry Lunch about dates and then the show will finally be 'in the bag'..

Which leads straight to the project that I propose for Cologne: I have been invited to do a performance and I am planning a project on idioms and how people say what they don't mean in order to say what they do mean and how this can be confusing at the best of times but how it becomes potentially humorously confusing and tangled up when I bring other country's idioms into the mix…

How exactly this will become a performance I can't tell you, I am having a little stage fright when I think about it. The original concept was for a photography and film piece, not a performance. But I spoke to Steve Boyland about it today and we are considering to work on this project in collaboration. With his voice work potentially being the exact perfect link to tie together my ideas for the project.

Now I need to appease the man who invited me by sending him a better project description, he is cross with me for having responded with such delay..

Rightly so. I deserve a slap and half an hour in the corner for that.

I will go now and clean my toilet while I repent.

I posted my proposal to 'Fred' in Cumbria and am quite pleased with myself…

A light anticlimax took grip of me around 4pm but I beat it down with a swift panini followed by New York cheesecake..

Tonight I will sleep and know that it is well earned and tomorrow I am sure is another arm-long list of things to do and follow up.

More inspirational stuff when I rise from, what I predict will be a 14 hour long, sleep…