Willow and I spent Sunday afternoon at the Clore Ballroom saying our farewell to The Bibliomancer's Dream and doing an evaluation which was really useful and gives us ideas for next time.
Southbank are keeping the installation for the time being with the possibility of it being shown again and I think a lot could be done to ensure it runs to its optimum as it was so popular that its scrolls got depleted very quickly most days. However this did not seem to deter the public from using it for bibliomancy anyway, as well as a place to sit reflect, read and interact to on that level it was very successful. I would have liked the written texts of participants to be more visible within the space so subsequent people could have read and responded but we have ideas about how this could be designed in next time
I realise, comparing the experience to Crafting Space and The Loom Project where we were a team of people in constant engagement with the work and there to facilitate the public at any given moment, that the 'live' aspect of my public installations need to be treated like a production process in themselves as they are so heavily participatory and the very physicality of the work requires regular tending to. This is a budget issue and something I will bear in mind when planning next time. Of course the audience volume and opening times were so much bigger and longer and it will be a case-by-case consideration.
I sat and did my last act of bibliomancy on sunday. I was thinking about my mother and how she would have loved the show and also about where she is now (physically, scattered in the ocean. Spiritually- everywhere, I feel) and I pulled out a poetry book called The Twelve Lays of the Gipsy' by Kostis Palamas. The passage I fell apon was:
'In the depths of the ocean,
Where the light does not penetrate,
There live whales, which see, though the sun does not shine apon them.
Their sun
Is in their own bodies , phosphorescence which imparts to them
The dim vision of an underwater dream'
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May this Dream rest in peace (for the time being..)
Now I can focus once more on my own R+D which is starting to take real shape and revealing the shape of its gift to me slowly…
