I cannot believe that the Bibliomancer's Dream is going to be over within a week. It has been a whirlwind, the constant events of the Imagine festival and the half term week saw it lovingly mobbed by children and adults alike.
We just had not forseen how popular it would be and how quickly the scrolls would run out – we got through 5000 metres in a week (the amount we estimated for the whole month) and it has become impossible to keep up with demand. Of course I am not around on a daily basis to deal with it, it's the production team (and Willow an Terence were there a lot for the first week) but I think they are learning a lot about how it would be run second time around. It's also the nature of the Clore Ballroom space, it seems to be a space the public feels ownership of and so the space and this installation are rather like someone's front room, a living organism that gets unmade and remade every day.
However, even when the spools have run out though, the space is still full of people sitting around reading and bibliomancing -they write on bits of paper and leave them on the desks in the hope they will get written in, so its the intellectual act of engaging with the work that seems to continue despite the exhaustion of available scrolls which is an encouraging thought.
Am running a book art workshop with willow this week for the entire Limes Farm school (who I am doing a Creative Partnerships project with until the summer). 75 children per session inside the installation! Luckily i was there during some of the live workshops at the festival and got a sense of what it takes to hold the space in that way. It's going to be kind of insane fun….
