A Productive Morning...

in the darkroom:

cornwall

spent a couple of days down in cornwall - I couldn't get over how green and lush everything looked - everywhere dry stone walls were frothing with foxgloves, ferns and saxifraga,

and on a long walk along a coastal path I spied a scattering of miniature wild orchids...

with the weather holding out, we had a few lazy days on the beach too...

Sutton House

Last summer I went on an free short course in community gardening run by the properly excellent Cordwainers Grow. They got in touch with their ex-students recently about an opportunity to work with Sutton House on a growing project - specifically turning a big beautiful vintage coach sitting in the latter's grounds into a greenhouse...sounded dreamy.

A few of us met up to discuss the project, and what we thought we could do, or grow, in the space. Later, I drafted our expression of interest and later still, lo, our group were accepted. 
...a little gardening to look forward to on those long summer evening still to come..

Langley Vale

Back in January TRP and I roused ourselves from the general fug of post Christmas-time and spent a couple of late nights working on a little competition for the Woodland Trust. A very nice one actually, a small visitor centre for a woodland that has yet to be planted - the idea of a new forest nestled within ancient ones is something special. 
That was a good starting point; our building would initially exist in an empty clearing, we imagined it as a glass-y box hovering in a mist of clustered timber columns. Then, as the woodland begins to grow the columns around the building envelope dissipate into the new growth. As the trees mature, the visitor centre is no longer an abstracted forest in an empty space but a clearing within the canopy of dense woodland. 
Building as woodland in clearing > building as clearing in woodland. I still think it's a strong narrative. We were happy with the submission, a simple, axial plan, decent images…

The shortlist of three was announced today. We didn't make it. That's ok, there were over 250 entries. Perhaps the judges didn't dig our 'Don't Look Now' icy vibe...well, no images released as yet so I'm reserving all judgment until I see the chosen submissions...

Some like it HUT

JM and I entered a competition for a beach hut on the Eastbourne seafront just before christmas. We liked the idea of a simple repeating timber truss, clad in between with shiny metal shingles. Here are our initial competition boards - I thought they looked pretty good.

We got long listed. And then this week we got shortlisted - hurray - currently getting A1 boards and a model together for the final jury in March.

In Colour

Popped into Ann Veronica Janseens 'yellowbluepink' installation at the Wellcome Trust over lunch today:

sort of scary, sort of comforting...

Me in the Mirror

All Press

When I was young I used to press flowers.
Flicking through my notebooks this week it seems I never kicked the habit...

On Beauty

After a hot day, and during a balmy night I headed to the Defining Beauty exhibition at the British Museum (via the Totem Pole, naturally).

I was, despite the crowd, and the heat, or perhaps because of it, suitably spellbound by the miracle on offer – such likeness of skin rendered from stone. But amid the display of athletically poised torsos, I was most taken by an intricate likeness of the philosopher Socrates, no more than foot tall, depicted with his arm thrown skyward from his pleated gown, mid scene in Aristophenes's comedy 'The Clouds'.

Paraphrasing the exhibition text (as hastily scribbled onto a crumpled receipt)

Socrates has arrived on stage in a basket having

suspended his intellect in the air 

in order to gain closer access 

to things of higher importance.

What a lovely idea. And though he has come back down to Earth, he continues to gesture upwards.

On my way home later that night, gentle fat droplets turned to heavy rain in an instant, a heavy drone of falling water. I got soaked. I didn't mind. Sheltering in the bus stop, with the Friday traffic that much louder for the added hiss and slick of the flooded streets I thought of old Socrates, as I'd just seen him. Looking up.

Border Zone

An early start on Saturday; we were doing a one day booze crusie to Calais ahead of N&R’s wedding. 

Why is the Dover ferry port so determinedly a non-place? Everything is so resolutely temporary - with even less interest in dampening the transport infrastructure aspect than the average motorway services - yet has probably been fixed in arrangement for years. Of course it’s a transit zone, but evidently the fact that you are already on your way somewhere at the time you arrive there is not precaution enough, everything about the space guards against you getting too comfortable, and there is absolutely nothing to soften the tarmac.

With time to kill on the way back we took a detour into the Calais old town and an altogether opposite experience – a sunny beach with rows of cheerfully weathered changing huts strung out along its length - a different kind of temporary.