She had fodder in her wings.
She had dust inside her brains.
Oh how sad. Oh how sad. Oh how sad.
Nina Simone
Oh how sad. The time’s come for “Down” to leave it’s temporary home at Metal, Liverpool. Although Ailis and I will be showing the work elsewhere, it’s going to be hard to find a spot as perfect as that tall, square, red brick accumulator tower and its rusty memories of steam trains and the future. I feel a bit put out that Down has to be separated from other pieces in the show too – everything worked so well together, thanks to Jenny Porter’s thoughtful curating… but I suppose it would be hard to appreciate things if they didn’t come to an end, and such melancholy is cosy in an autumnal sort of way.
Unlike Tenneson & Dale and its ongoing exploration of order (and therefore its parallel and continuous evaluation/re-evaluation process), this particular collaboration has always had a fixed end point, which now that it’s here, grants me a different kind of evaluative perspective. I need to take a break and think properly about what I’ve learnt from the whole experience. Working with someone as determined and focussed as Ailis has been fantastic – the overriding “take home messages” have been THINK BIG and DON’T SETTLE…. We could have given up at an early stage, when the double-headed greedy beast of Health and Safety crossed our path; we could have ended up with a project that was finished in half the time, but the end result would have been weaker – and what would have been the point of that? I feel now a bit like I did when I first asked my teacher what the biggest number was and it’s a good reminder: make your project as big as you can…. and then make it a little bit bigger… and do it again…
