Another month has passed, but what a month. It's full force head on the projects front! A brief resume of what is going on, after having been out of touch for so long..
1. I am now working with Saj Fareed on setting up the first workshops for my R+D, which is going to eventually turn into a nomadic textile installation on a wide-reaching scale. I think i finally cracked what form it has to take, more on this soon.
2. An installation at the Royal Festival Hall (Clore Ballroom) ..hooray, one of my favourite spaces in the country I am so blessed and very excited. I got called in just before Xmas – one of the producers, Becca, had been sent images of my Origin piece and other projects and she invited me to come and discuss ideas. She is one of the participation producers, with a speciality in visual arts and could see straightaway some resonances with their programming and asked me to come up with an idea to coincide with the 'Imagine' children's literature festival next month.
I got an idea together which is based on a practice that is dear to my heart – bibliomancy (the art of divining with books) and it is already in the fabrication stage. The fastest turnaround project I have ever done and also the biggest! But it has been coming together remarkably swiftly and I have had the gift of bringing Willow and a friend of hers, Terence Williams, to design and engineer a Heath Robinson type system behind the work.
The project is called 'The Bibliomancer's Dream' and offers people the chance to intuitively select from one of 4000 books, then open up the book at random and write the line/verse found onto a section of giant scroll.
The structure is basically an enormous set of 12 bookcases set out in a half-circle shape. Most of them have writing desks attached, with a giant scroll flying across the desk that you write on and a spool/pulley system linked to a crank at the other end that you wind on yourself once you have written your piece. The scroll then gets moved up and around the top of the bookcase, displaying your text and eventually getting rolled back up onto another spool. The scrolls will get cut into lengths and hang from the columns in the space so you can read what others wrote. The feel of the piece is time-travelled, ancient Chinese with a hint of the mad inventor and deranged poet I guess. It opens from feb 12th- March 3rd. I need some sleep now but will write again this week..
