"Love falls down and covers the people"

I'd meant to blog this much earlier, of course; put it down to what in the local vernacular is called "quake brain", a state of mind in which things are misplaced, forgotten, fall off the back of the desk, dry up, falter, and generally slip through your fingers. Quake brain (I loathe this and other chummy cliched coinings around Christchurch's natural disaster, but it's an accurate description, and I don't have other words for it) is a bit like that strange fog you experience in the first days and weeks after a baby is born, when shock and exhaustion and a new hypervigilance renders you temporarily a spectator in the world rather than a participant. You are out of sorts with the world; you have misplaced your agency; you sit, and wait, and watch, while around you the current of history keeps moving. I imagine "quake brain" is a modern term for a very old thing.

What I missed, in the fog and dust of the past few months, is a desire to publicly acknowledge a series of beautiful collaborations arising from the inclusion of my daughter's story 'This is about earthquakes' in the literature category for the annual Mix and Mash competition. I was very much moved both by the inclusion of the text by organisers Pip Adam and Fiona Rigby, and by the new works which were created as a result, inspired in part by my daughter's experience of the February earthquake in Christchurch.

Here are some of the remixed works derived from 'This is about earthquakes', with a short excerpt under each link:

Hera Bird's prose poem 'The Mountain' (from which the title of this post is, in turn, drawn):

"We want to believe that love will keep us safe. But love will not keep us safe. Love has no central nervous system. Love looks like it's wearing a white hat. The mountain is covered with love."

Megan Clayton's poem 'Untitled (This is about earthquakes)':

And Brooke Phelan's delightful illustrations:

Click through on the links above to read the new works. And you can read more entries in the literature category of Mix and Mash here.

Small bang theory

"If Daddy did a massive fart, and you lit it with a match, then BOOM! There'd be a new sun."

The small guy explains the formation of the universe.

(How uncouth.)

The Daisy Boat

On a walk to Mona Vale last year, my three-year-old daughter made a sculpture. It was a few days after the big earthquake in June, and it was the first time we'd been out for a long walk. For a while, afterwards, you need to stay close to home. Immediately after a big earthquake, when the windows have stopped rattling and the ground is still again you hold the children close, and move around the house in a body. Your chest is tight and your breath is shallow and you stiffen when a truck rumbles past. Gradually the invisible ropes slacken, and you can bear for a child to be in one room while you're in another, or downstairs while you're upstairs, or even out in the garden while you're in the house. Gradually you stop expecting that at any minute there will be another earthquake.

At Mona Vale in June we sat on a bench in the weak winter sun, and watched army helicopters fly back and forth overhead. My daughter picked daisies and piled them on a leaf. We threw bread to the ducks. Purple crocuses were coming up under the oak trees. The ground had spread by the river, and muddy gouges seared the lawns. A minibus disgorged a party of Japanese tourists, who stood on the cracked driveway, blinking, and got out their cameras.

When we left, we floated the daisy boat in the river and watched the current take it.

May 2012 be less historic than 2011.

Poutama

That was 2011: my year in mobile phone pictures.

(With acknowledgments to Philip Matthews, whose idea this was.)

Pyne Gould Corporation Building, Cambridge Terrace, Christchurch. 13 February 2011

Oxford Terrace Baptist Church, 13 February 2011

Rose, St George's Hospital

St George's Hospital, Merivale

War Memorial, Elmwood School, 22 February 2011

Merivale, 22 February 2011

Sink hole, Heaton Street, 25 February 2011

Damage at Heaton Intermediate School, 25 February 2011

Lamb and Hayward Funeral Chapel, Wai-mana, Rangiora, March 2011. Looking towards the mountains.

Stephen Bambury, Home is the First Abstraction (2011), Jonathan Smart Gallery, April 2011

The Merivale Wolf

Death's head lemon

The colour of the water in August

Anton Parsons, Passing Time, Wilson's Reserve, Madras Street. Installed September 2011

RWC, October 2011

Room, October 2011

Auckland Art Gallery, inside Luc Piere's Environment III, November 2011

Staircasing, 23 December 2011

Modernism and a chunky rump pie

We're just back from a family holiday on the Sunshine Coast of Australia, which, as ever, involved plenty of sea and sand, and only as much culture as could be gleaned from the shelves of the Crocodile Hunter's Australia Zoo shop.

Some characteristic cultural merch.

Unfortunately I had quite a lot of work that I needed to take with me. There were several occasions during which I lay by the pool in my regulation black artworld swimsuit reading eye-wateringly dull books with 'Aesthetics' and 'Modernism' in their titles, feeling like an utter tosspot as people in flowery boardshorts and bikinis with tattoos in surprising places dived in and sunned themselves around me.

Sampling the local produce.

While I was writing, the kids and the big guy spent a lot of time on the beach, building massive multi-storey sandcastles with moats and general fortifications. Earthquakes, and the social and architectural devastation at home in Christchurch, seemed a long way away. But when the sand was a bit dry and the castles collapsed, the kids referred to the fallen turrets as 'Christchurch ones'. "Earthquaaaaake! Geronimo!" You'd go in for a swim, and see kids itching to jump on the ruins, stamp them flat. Others would want to join in the re-building.

On the beach at Mooloolaba it struck me that the world can largely be divided into two kinds of people: those who enjoy building sandcastles, the larger, the better-engineered, and the more whimsical the better; and those who prefer to destroy them. It's a great pity that the future of our city appears to be in the hands of the latter.

The man with the ponytail

"Hey! Hey!" The three-year-old, in an accusing tone, pointing out of the car window. "That man has a ponytail!"

The small guy, immensely weary, age seven, dragging his eyes up from his book. "Where?"

"There!"

"Where?"

"There! The man with the ponytail!"

"Oh, OK."

"Why does he have a ponytail?"

"Dunno."

"Do you have a ponytail?"

"Cretin. You know I don't."

"Why does that man have a ponytail? Why does he?"

"I dunno. Some men do."

"No they don't."

"Yes they do. That man has one."

"What man?"

"Oh do shut up."

"Does Daddy have one?"

"No. You know he doesn't."

"Yes he does."

"He does not. Shut up, please."

"Daddy hasn't got any hair!"

"Yes he does."

"He doesn't. He doesn't have any hair."

"He does so! Will you shut up."

"No! Daddy hasn't got any hair, but he does have a ponytail."

"SHUT UP!"


Sometimes I wish family cars came with a plastic screen between the front and back seats, like a New York taxi.

Verbal restraint

As regular readers will know, one of the things I miss about being in the formal workplace (and consequently the subject of my occasional semi-wistful bloggery) is the swearing. I have no idea if other professional workplaces--accountants' offices, perhaps, or legal chambers--are as sweary as art galleries, whose denizens rival printers, mechanics and even various off-duty doctors of my acquaintance for volleys of creative verbal filth.

It's a terrible truth which antenatal classes and parenting manuals somehow omit to inform you of (and if they were to, no doubt the birth-rate would decline even further): when you stay at home to look after small children, your swearing days are over, or are at least cruelly curtailed. Many women take up part-time work again for that very reason.

If, like me, you come from a long unbroken line of champion super-heavyweight Olympic-grade swearers, you will find this unintended consequence of parenthood both a terrible imposition and a personal liability. Although in the right hands swearing is both funny and clever, it is neither when issuing forth from the angelic mouth of a three-year-old. Verbal restraint is required. For the first time I have understood wherefore 'sugar' and 'flip', though as yet I have not plumbed those feeble saccharine depths.

The Periodic Table to Swearing, by Modern Toss

Consequently, at our house creative substitutions of the Beavis and Butthead variety are occasionally required. But in the hands of the small guy, who has ears like a bat and a great love of colourful language (he does share the industrial-strength DNA, after all), this can quickly lead to conversations of the following nature:

"Zip it, fartknocker!"
"No, you zip it. And don't say fartknocker."
"No, you zip it, Mum."
"Zip it! I mean it."
"OK." (Whispering.) "Fartknocker."
"What?"
"Heh heh. Nothing." (Very faint whispering.) "Fartknocker."
"What?!"
"Nothing."

Etc. As I've noted before, this is not the sort of conversation you'd ever imagine you'd be involved in. But after you have children you're lucky if it only happens once a day. And if it's as mild as this. I've gained a new-found respect for my own father's clearly superhuman powers of verbal restraint.

Art dinners

Tintoretto, Last Supper, oil on canvas, Venice, Italy, 1594. Via The Art Writer

Over the years, I have been to a lot of art dinners. Some of these have been relaxed, stylish, enjoyable affairs: others have not. I've eaten dinner with art people after exhibition openings in cheap and cheerful Chinese restaurants where dinner is a thinly veiled excuse for terrible Karaoke performances. I've been to small well-mannered art dinners in private rooms and clubs, and I've been to the kind of big riotous dinners which end in arguments over the check and no one remembering who ordered what.

I'm familiar with all the tricks and types; the rueful pocket-patting 'lost wallet haka'; the drunken uninvited plus-one; the person who orders several expensive bottles of wine and leaves early, paying only for their food; the person who wishes only to discuss their current multiple international projects; the person who insists on recounting at length the compliments paid to them by other more famous people; in fact, I'm familiar with the whole catalogue of art dinner crimes. I'm also well-versed in the strategic sit-down. This is a technical move in which you hang back and then make a rush for it at the critical moment in order to be seated by interesting fellow-diners. (Or at least not stuck at the end of the table, wedged into a corner with the dull ones. Or having to sit with your legs inelegantly astride the table leg. I never fancy that much.)

Due largely to the dampening effects of earthquakes both on exhibition openings and restaurants, I haven't been to an art dinner for some time. But the other week I was invited to one. I was quite excited about this. So excited, in fact, that I forgot myself completely and started boasting about my past prowess at the strategic sit-down manoeuvre. "Oh yes," I caught myself saying airily. "The important thing is to know exactly when to sit down. It's all about the timing."

I think you may have an idea of where this story is going.

I got to the restaurant a few minutes early. I hadn't been there before, though I'd heard good things about it; a Thai restaurant in a small suburban mall, which has had great reviews. (With the central city closed, the good neighbourhood businesses are really coming into their own.) It was noisy, fragrant with spices, filled with couples and families and small groups of people eating dinner and talking animatedly. Black-uniformed waiting staff circulated busily through the room. There was a long table over to one side. "I'm here to have dinner with a big group," I said to the harrassed-looking maitre'd. "But it looks like I'm the first one here."

"Please sit down," he said, gesturing to the long table.

"Do you mind if I wait over here?" I asked. "I'll feel a bit of a dick sitting at that big table by myself."

"No, please sit down," he answered, his professional smile tightening. So I did. And in the modern style, passed the time tweeting about what a dick I felt.

Some minutes passed. I read the replies to my tweets, variously facetious and sympathetic. I checked the clock. I began to feel uneasy. Had I got the time wrong? Had I got the date wrong? Had they cancelled and no one told me? A waitress came over and took my drink order. "Don't worry," she said kindly. "Your friends will probably be here soon." The glass of wine took ages to arrive, and still I sat there, pretending I had important business to do on my phone, all alone at a table for twenty.

It took nearly half an hour before people started to arrive. Advancing on the long table, a couple looked at me with interest, but kept going, down to the other end of the table. Clearly they didn't want to sit with me. Which was fine, because I didn't know them. But then I was struck by a horrible thought. Had there been a double-booking? I got up and went to the other end of the table to talk to the strangers.

"Are you here for the art thing?" I asked.

"No, it's a dinner for Heidi," the woman answered.

And then I was struck by the most horrible thought of all. "This restaurant is called Sema, isn't it? Sema's Thai Cuisine?"

"No, this is Corianders. Did you want Sema? It's over there, across the walkway."

The woman was roaring with laughter. She was incredulous. "Surely you realised this is an Indian restaurant?" And of course, as I looked around, it was unmistakably so.

At Sema's, my party had already been there for half an hour, the bottles were open, the conversation was flowing, and there were only two seats left at the end of the long table. Happily, everyone present was interesting and I wasn't required to Have The Leg.

Forgive me

At school recently, the small guy and his classmates had a go at writing poems in different styles, using models written by great modern poets. The small guy felt a particular affinity with the example he read by William Carlos Williams, and wrote this in homage.


This is just to say

I have put
a rat
in
your bed

in which
you were
probably going
to sleep

Forgive me
you said
you liked
animals

Resilience

"Resilience" is a word we're hearing a lot these days in Christchurch. In fact, the visionary new Central City Plan includes the words 'resilient' or 'resilience' 36 times in 154 pages. Our ruined city will be rebuilt with a foundation of resilience. The new buildings which populate it will be resilient to the violent seismic activity which we have now come to expect. Social resilience and the strength of communities will be considered in the construction of urban public space and in zoning decisions. (Technology, in the new Christchurch, will be at the service of society: like the bionic man, the city will be stronger and better than before. A resilient utopia on the plains. Eventually.)

And significantly, the people of Canterbury, who have experienced more than 2500 earthquakes of M3 and above in the last year, are often said by national and local commentators to be extremely resilient.

Tough, even.

That was how National Radio introduced their piece on the devastating news that 20% of Kaiapoi's homes would be forcibly demolished due to severe land damage. "They're tough, in Kaiapoi..."

Visitors' Centre at Kaiapoi, tilted by the earthquake. Cables restrain the building from sliding into the river. Image via WozaWanderer.

Except that they're not. And the people of nearby Christchurch are not. They're the same as people anywhere, in Ponsonby or Temuka or Karori or Murupara. The people of New Zealand's second-biggest city are not a sturdy-legged race of dour peasants with a high pain threshold. They're you, and your Mum, and your neighbours, and the guy in the dairy, and the people you went to school with. Just New Zealand people. No tougher, no weaker than anyone else. And a year's worth of earthquakes, the loss of houses and possessions and in some cases friends and family members has taken its toll on us all.

Like their counterparts in town, the people of the Kaiapoi red zone are likely to be devastated that they will be forced to leave their homes and that in many cases the payout they receive will be insufficient to buy another house. Many older people, or people on low fixed incomes, of which there are plenty in the residential red zones (I think perhaps that fact is a story in itself), will be unable to raise a mortgage. They will be forced to rent, seeing the equity they once had in their homes drain into the pockets of others. They will see the modest savings that they had hoped to pass on to their children disappear into the profit statements of banks and property developers. They will be forced to leave their homes and their communities, where the personal relationships built up over years have ensured a means of social support for the vulnerable. The question of people's toughness in the face of these repeated blows to their financial and social security is glib, irrelevant and insulting.

The story, clearly, is in what's happening to the people, not in the presumption of their stoic emotional response.

To their great credit, National Radio instantly changed their tack on the interview with Kaiapoi's mayor, after being tweeted about the inherent wrongness of the "they're tough down there" line of approach. The interviewer read out the tweet and asked if it were true that people were devastated. And immediately, they got a response in which he described the great financial, social and emotional cost that local people, including he and his family, were faced with. The earthquakes were the first disaster; their financial consequences for individuals are the second. The mayor's voice cracked as he spoke. He sounded like a courageous man dealing with great uncertainty. This was proper radio journalism. The right questions were asked to get an accurate account of a person's experience. It told a very different story than the ridiculous pre-packaged Tough Southerners routine.

The frame that's put round a view of the world has a great deal to do with the way we understand what we're looking at. A tiny shift to one side or the other makes all the difference in telling a story. If you're standing in any street in Christchurch, things may look much as they always have: but turn 45 degrees and there will be piles of rubble and gaps in the streetscape like broken teeth. The sheer magnitude of it all -- three major destructive earthquakes, the closing and levelling of the CBD, the sleepless nights, the deaths, the injuries, the financial cost, the loss of certainty and peace of mind and personal security -- is only just starting to be realised. The people are as damaged as the city.

I've never been more aware of the importance of the humanities to people and society than in the last year. The humanities help people make sense of the great events of their own lives and times. There are stories that can only be told through mediums such as painting, or literary non-fiction, or poetry, or music. Stories that in their magnitude can only be approached sideways, through the details of a single life. The eyewitness reportage that journalism adds to the historical account is the basis for many of the stories that can be told later. The particular frame that the artist or the writer puts on their account of life in the city after the earthquake -- what they leave out, what they put in -- determines how these events, and their politics, will be remembered. It's critical that journalism gets it right as the medium of first response.

The first post-earthquake art is starting to be produced in the city. And it's good. Writers started early, endeavouring to make sense of the experience. The Arts Festival featured a work of contemporary dance entitled Tilt, where the dancers performed on a moving, tilting floor surface. And Christchurch musician Ed Muzik has been working on an EP concerned with post-quake life and politics. Entitled Ed Muzik Hates It, a reworking of an ad campaign which features pillars of the local community 'loving' the city, the EP features songs such as EQC Are Looking At My House, The Merivale Working Men's Club, and Double Brownlee (the latter of which includes the immortal lines "I don't know why the peasants moan/ Forget red or green, you're in the brown zone).  You can order Hates It here, if you like that sort of thing.

Artist Tony de Lautour was interviewed recently for the Canterbury Arts and Heritage Trust's wonderful Articulate series, in which prominent local artists speak about their experiences of the earthquake. After the quake, he exhibited some of his damaged work in Wellington, following its rescue from his eighth-floor studio in Cathedral Square, behind the red zone cordon.

He talks about the earthquakes manifesting themselves in his work, perhaps subconsciously, as cut-ups, as well as the experience of the earthquake affecting the way artists might work.

"It was a terrible experience and I wouldn't wish it on anyone, but since you're here you might as well make the best of it. It's a totally unique experience that as an artist you should be able to draw something from it. I don't mean doing paintings of the Cathedral broken down or anything like that. But it can affect the way you're working. It can be character-building in terms of toughening up your attitude to getting work done."

This is the kind of genuine resilience that I find inspirational. The strength which comes from the traditions of art and culture; from the people who continue to make new works amid piles of rubble. And in the work of artists like Ed, and Tony, and others, we'll increasingly start to see parallels and analogues for our own experiences which might help people to think through the violent destruction of the old way of life and imagine a different future: here, in the same place, where everything has changed.

Lies I Have Told My Children

Over at the Herald, Sideswipe columnist and miscellanist Ana Samways has quoted a couple of Lies I Have Told My Children.

1. If you pee in the swimming pool, red dye appears in the water around you and an alarm goes off. 
   
2. If you type in my smartphone password wrongly 10 times in a row, the phone will explode.

Useful? You're welcome.

A packet of cigs at Exeter Railway Station

Exeter Central Railway station, Devon, England. 31/07/1969. Wikimedia Commons, via Rosser1954.

As the story goes, the publisher Allen Lane, returning to London from the West Country following a visit to crime writer Agatha Christie in the early 1930s, was trapped at Exeter railway station waiting for a train with nothing to read. He could buy cigarettes from a vending machine and flick through a newspaper; but otherwise he was on his own. Pacing about the platform and smoking, he conceived of a new range of cheap paperback books which would combine the mass market appeal of American pulp fiction with the modernist design of contemporary German imprints. (After his death, his family described him as part way between missionary and mercenary.) Lane's Penguin paperbacks would make literary fiction available to a wide reading public and would be sold initially from vending machines: the first 'Penguincubator' opened in Charing Cross Road the following year. The paperbacks cost no more than the price of a packet of cigarettes.

Andre Maurois's Ariel, the first Penguin book ever published, and something I have spent most of my life unsuccessfully keeping an eye out for in second-hand bookshops in the hope of making my fortune. (The image above, from Penguin.com, isn't a first edition: the first edition has no accent on the final 'e' of Andre.)

I've always liked this story, not only because I've been a voracious reader and purchaser of Penguin and Puffin paperbacks over the years, but because in my early childhood I too spent quite a lot of time on the platform at Exeter Railway Station, waiting for the train to London and worrying about reading matter. When packing for holidays at my grandparents' house, I would carefully calculate exactly how many books I would need to last both the journey and the visit. Joan Aiken's complete Midnight chronicles. Almost certainly a Molesworth. A couple of Jennings and Darbishires. Second hand copies of Malcolm Saville and Rumer Godden and Alan Garner, picked up from the market. And then I'd pop a couple more in my bag, just in case. Running out of books while away from home would be a disaster. One of the lowest depths of misery, I've always thought, is not having something to read.

On a recent trip away I realised that I hadn't packed a book. Knowing that without something to read I would be pacing around my hotel room like Allen Lane on the station platform, I bought Martin Edmond's extraordinary work of psychogeography, Dark Night, an account of Colin McCahon's lost hours in Sydney in 1984, and The Hill of Wool, Jenny Bornholdt's latest collection of poetry. Both are paperbacks; both include paintings by New Zealand artists on the cover; both writers, seemingly effortlessly, conjure up imaginative worlds with which I am familiar but which are at the same time beautifully, sometimes almost unbearably, strange. (I imagine that I'll carry round forever lines like Edmond's "the way the places we belong to do not belong to us", and Bornholdt's blood-streaked poem "Tower of London".) Both are books I'm pleased to own, and that I know I'll read again and again, but I did notice that each cost considerably more than a packet of cigarettes.

I'm not familiar with the current mechanics of paperback book pricing in New Zealand, but I do think there's something a bit strange when you can order obscure titles to be sent from England at a cheaper cost than you can buy paperbacks in New Zealand. Books are increasingly becoming a luxury item. (My recent purchases cost me respectively three times, and twice, the price of a packet of cigarettes.) I suppose if Allen Lane were still around, he'd be embracing digital formats as literature's new international mass-market vending machine. And the digital future of books, as VUP publisher Fergus Barrowman mentioned recently on Twitter, is likely to lie not with e-books but with "fluid text on multipurpose devices". The death of the novel, of course, has been darkly (and inaccurately) prophesied for decades now, but it may well be that the ubiquity and comparative cheapness of digital technologies will spell the gradual demise as the book-as-object.

I suspect that the distinction between mass publishing and literary publishing may well become increasingly sharp, returning to a time before Lane effectively brought the two together by starting the Penguin imprint. On the one hand, foil-jacketed bodice rippers and thrillers are being sold in mass outlets like supermarkets and big box variety stores, and on the other, literary books are being sold from arm chairs in small quiet rooms or by mail order. It might be wishful thinking, but I hope there will always be room for the cheaply-produced, stylishly-designed paperback book that Lane conceived in my home town: high-end literature in a mass-market format that's perfect for reading in the bath or at the beach or in frustrated moments at train stations when your battery has run down.

"Excessive physical manifestations of quiet internal desires"

Yesterday the small guy and I paid a visit to the School of Fine Arts to see the annual sculpture exhibition, 'Heavy Pattern'. It's the eighteenth annual group show, and includes work by third and fourth year students and postgraduates. The sculpture lecturers are Neil Dawson, Rob Hood, Louise Palmer and Bronwyn Taylor.

We'd come by way of PaperPlus where we were buying a birthday card for the small guy's uncle, who is an academic with a PhD in English Lit. "This is perfect!" said the small guy, brandishing one with an off-colour joke about a naked 90-year-old man at a flower show.* "He'll LOVE it!" Then his attention was caught by the musical cards. There was one that played the Kung Fu Fighting music when you opened it. Another one barked. But the best one of all had a chubby-faced muscle-man on the front. When you opened it, the man flexed his bicep to the accompaniment of a wet raspberry kind of noise.


"MUM! LOOK AT THIS CARD! IT DOES ARM FARTS!" shouted the small guy across the shop, opening and closing the card at top speed to release a deafening volley of fart noises. "POO! That's revolting! Pfffft! PFFFT! Say pardon! Hahahaha!"


It took some time to detach the small guy from the card, and with wistful looks over the shoulder we were just about to go when he spotted a school friend who'd just come into the shop with his grandmother and little sisters. "Hang on, Mum," he said, scuttling back to the card display and taking out the musical muscle-man again. "This is important. Hey, Oscar, come over here and look at this! You won't believe what this card does ... ARM FARTS! Actual ARM FARTS! POO-WEE! Say pardon please! PFFFT! PFFFFFFT! HAHAHAHAHA!"


And thus another pleasant five minutes passed as I waited in the queue to be served, looking somewhere into the middle distance, while a running commentary punctuated by loud farting noises and raucous giggles filled the shop. Eventually a frowning young man in PaperPlus uniform came over and told them to knock it off. "You're running down the battery," he said severely. "I was just putting the card back," said Oscar untruthfully, and scampered off. "That's probably the funniest thing I've ever seen, Mum," said the small guy, still giggling in the car five minutes later. "Definitely worth getting told off for."


At the art school I expected things to be a little more sombre. The student who'd emailed me the invitation to view the show had said, half-apologetically, that there were no humorous works in it, so I had in mind some serious exploration into mass and form and volume and material properties and negative space and all that proper oldie-fash sculptural stuff. No narratives, no pop culture, no horsing about. The first room was, in fact, a bit like that: a diverse series of works beautifully fabricated and installed.

Among them we particularly liked this work, a wild tangle of tree roots on one side, with the still-attached tree-trunk carved into a rough obelisk on the other. We didn't have a catalogue to hand, there weren't labels, and in some cases the website is slightly enigmatic; so I'm not certain who it's by.

This work by Lucy Matthews was positioned in the foyer outside the gallery. The artist describes it as an "excessive physical manifestation of quiet internal desires".
It was quite large, and the small guy asked if he could get inside it. There was no one around, but I thought it best not.

This work (I think it's Joins by Steve Walsh) is positioned in the courtyard between buildings. It's a satisfyingly improbable object.

This is a view of the sculpture gallery at the art school, which they call The Fridge. We had to wander around the studios for some time to find it, which was no hardship. At centre is our favourite work in the show, Tim Middleton's Phallic Tantrum. It's a punching bag in cast plaster. You really, really want to punch it when you see it, but think better of it, with considerable regret.

This fascinating list was written on a white board at the far end of The Fridge. Is it a work? Disinformation? A teaching aid? An enigma code for art historians?

"The central issue is that ... That is not good enough." Keir Leslie. This is scribbled on the white board near the list of sculptors. I still have this enigmatic text in my head. (I always respond warmly to a slacker aesthetic combined with harsh self-criticism.)

Alissa Gilbert's work for the show is a shop selling handmade objects including soap, T shirts,  sew-on patches, 'tawdry frivolities' and 'contemplative aids'. Pictured above is a shelf of 'Deadwood Soap'. You could also take small free samples of the soap home, which was nice, and we did.

Gilbert has pasted up a poster around the art school which reads COME TO MY SHOP YOU FILTHY BITCHES. The small guy read this out loud with some satisfaction. When he saw the Divine poster pictured above hanging in her shop his enthusiasm knew no bounds. "Buy my sheeeee-it." He was still repeating the phrase under his breath an hour later. It was the second-best cultural highlight of his day. 

I suspect what he took from today's school holiday outings was the useful knowledge that what you get told off for doing in a chainstore is often quite acceptable at an art exhibition.

*Prize for "best dried arrangement".