It’s the end of week 3 already! Today felt quiet and unofficial. Laura, the centre director, and Barbara were not there; there was only a steward in the morning (the afternoon steward was stuck in her motor home somewhere near the M4), so the place was closed to the public in the afternoon; and there were no visitors except for people who were here yesterday for the workshop and had come to remove the clay from within their Strange Beings. Also, Ben came with me for moral support in all the roof-work which needed completing, which gave the day a holiday atmosphere.
Chloe and Juliet and their Daddy (who has a name! Marcus) arrived with balloons and crowns, to take out the clay.
One balloon escaped – Ben and I think we saw it loitering around Port Vale when we went for lunch! It had shrunk a bit…
In the afternoon, Sue and Caroline came to remove the clay from their sculptures.
Ben helped me all day, for which I was extrememly grateful, especially when he stood behind me while I was high up on the ladder. I finally completed covering all the dodgy joins, shoring up nodes and tentacles, and fixing everything properly to joists at the very tops.
At 4.30pm, if I hadn’t felt quite so hot and tired, and worried about my friend Sally-Ann who fell downstairs yesterday, I would have felt elated because the whole gallery installation is complete. The only thing left to do next week is grow the snakey tendrils through the windows and walls to colonise the courtyard. And to give the exhibition a name – I shall be contemplating that over the next few days.
Finishing touches
And this is how we left it at 4.30
This was the temperature when we got into the car…
In the car on the way home, I said, ‘It’s amazing that you can make a forest out of a load of Amazon boxes’.
Ben said, ‘It’s amazing that you can make a load of Amazon boxes out of a forest’. Which was true, and more depressing.
This got us thinking about circularity: what if I resoak the cardboard roots when I deinstall the exhibition, and fashion them into boxes? Or perhaps more subversive and hard-hitting: make a video of me chopping the Amazon forest down then planting soybeans in its place.
It’s the final week next week, and I can enjoy just being at Courtyard Arts with nothing much more to accomplish (I mean in this residency, not in life).
SUSANNA CANDLIN - Artist 
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