What The Matter Is

I’m in Bury today and tomorrow getting started on the #dawnchorus Twitter project initiated by Natasha Vicars and Mary Paterson. We’re looking at ways to use the platform to create a collaborative dawn performance. I’ve never used Twitter before – I set up an account a year or two ago to track the gradual fall of several hair grips from my hair, but in the end I never did it, and the account has been dormant ever since. This project’s a good way (back) in, because we’re thinking about how to use the existing structure to develop an intervention with a new set of structures and relations.

We talked a lot about Twitter, but we also talked about dawn (I didn’t know dawn light counted as twilight too), and about birds. People tend to have good stories about birds. Darwin broke many hearts when he pronounced the dawn chorus a territorial showdown and not the celebration of a new day’s hope. Birds don’t hope, he said. My new garden shares a blackbird with the adjoining gardens. It’s the only one there so it gets the best worms. You see them in its beak. A lovely dawn story emerged about a father feeding his new baby at five every morning, by a window looking over an empty street.

Now and again we stopped to write 140 characters or less about our relationship with Twitter, to see how it changed as the day progressed.

Here’s how mine developed between 10:30am and 5:30pm. My relationship with Twitter is…

-1- not very much of a relationship. Mainly, worries about writing too much, about starting and never going on, about getting etiquettes wrong.

-2- I DIDN’T DIE I’M STILL HERE THIS IS MY TREE

-3- under construction. If I can ignore the graphic design – that’s a big if – I might let it be a good place for short poems with ragged edges.

-4- to do with gardens and birds and dawn. Nice. I wonder if getting my phone out to tweet these things will spoil them. The screen’s so bright.

You can see I’m not yet wholeheartedly resolved, but there’s still time and I do want to find a way to like it. (2 isn’t as weird as it sounds: it’s a quote from Natasha, who was paraphrasing what Darwin claimed birds mean when they tweet at dawn. It gets cold at night so some of the birds die before sunrise. I suppose it’s just re-tweeting a re-tweeted re-tweet. Sorry.)

I’m writing this in the lobby of a conference centre in Manchester where I’ve found free wifi. Above me a large brass sphere has been swinging through space with great composure, at odds with the thin music being piped into the room. If I crane my neck to the right I can read a brass plaque beside me: “THE FOUCAULT PENDULUM. The pendulum swings in a place which retains a fixed orientation in space while the earth rotates beneath it. As a result the end points of the pendulum bob’s swing trace out a circular path.” So the earth’s been moving all this time. Even though there’s easy-clean carpet on the floor and tinned music in the air and I’m staring at a shiny screen.

ps. VINYL SAGA UPDATE: this morning I phoned the vinyl people from the tram between Manchester Piccadilly and Bury. They were happy to recut the titles and express courier them straight to Edinburgh so it all arrives at the gallery tomorrow. All fingers crossed. I wonder if the first copy is sitting on my doorstep back at home by now..

It’s horrible. The vinyl lettering still hasn’t arrived. I’m going to have to re-order it first thing tomorrow and have it couriered to Edinburgh for the following day.

Still, I think I might amend the lettering. I want to add the title for “Making Ends Meet”, in which two people whistle to one another one note at a time, so neither has control of the tune. It ends up as a strangely sincere and inscrutable conversation, and I want to see how it works between strangers.

I’d like to trial the project at the Edinburgh show with a view to restaging it at a museum I met with on Friday.. more on that another day.

For now, the whole exhibition is packaged into a single suitcase (not sure where my clothes are going to go) and barring the vinyl it’s all ready to hang.

ps. it’s amazing how long I can spend formatting and reformatting an exhibition layout when it isn’t even on my URGENT list. It’s on my OK IF YOU MUST list. The things on that list seem more fun, even if it’s just because they’re non-urgent.

The shelves are all painted and dry, lined up on the studio floor ready to package for Edinburgh. LOOK AT ME calling it “the studio”. There’s no furniture in here yet except for a little desk by the window, so the floor’s available for making a mess. Perhaps I should keep it like this. Only three posts ago I was writing about how I tend to set up designated art-making spaces only to work elsewhere, but now I’m making three-dimensional things again it’s more practical to keep everything in one contained room. A STUDIO.

Here’s a photo of the STUDIO floor.

And here are a couple of the trials I’ve been doing for the shelves. I’d been planning to make all the shelf poems in advance and bring them up ready to install. But they’ll get scrunched up in the suitcase and all the smooth lines will be crimped and might need replacing. So I think it makes more sense to bring the equipment and make the poems on site, even if the install takes longer. Site writing.

It means there’s less of a rush today too, which is a relief. There’s a lot of paperwork accumulating.

GOOD: first coat finished.

BAD: still in pyjamas.

Ahem. Turned out I didn’t get the illustrator file right after all. Had to resend it.

Today was B&Q and blisters from the drill. We’ve made 28 shelves, all fairly small and some excessively so (deeper than they are wide). I’m back home now with the shelves laid out on the floor dejectedly. There’s still so much to do. Tomorrow I’m going to paint them all white, then add the black edge. The vinyl lettering should (i.e. has to) arrive tomorrow, and I also hope to solve the mystery of how to stick 14 light bulbs to 14 glass bottle-stops. I’m thinking about sellotaping them, and making the join and the handiwork of it very visible. I’m suspicious of invisible joins.

I’ve had to find myself a bigger suitcase. The whole exhibition is coming on the train with me to Edinburgh, and I’ve just found out I’ll be stopping off for two nights in Manchester on the way. More about that another day…

I think I’ve gone slow because there’s too much to do. Sometimes when there’s too much to do I go FAST. Tonight it’s SLOW.