They are starting the install of the The Bibliomancer's Dream today at the Clore Ballroom. I am not needed till tomorow, so have just been feeding creative choices and responses in by email and phone in this last week. I have really been enjoying the more hands-off approach and I feel very confident in the South Bank team’s ability to pull this incredible short-turnaround project into a public installation by Thursday when we open.
This is such a shift in my practice as up until now I have project managed almost all my own work. However it has been an intention of mine for this to change as I always ended up almost burning out, paying myself very little and not able to do any other projects properly. I realize I need the time, energy and guaranteed fee to do other things at the same time – professional and family-based.
I have really enjoyed the poem-based jobs I have had on this project, like choosing poems for display and also spending a day at the Saison Poetry Library making a wishlist from their collection for potential bookcase stocking.
I realize I have drawn a lot more inspiration from poetry than visual arts for my work and that bibliomancy (the art of divining with books) is like an old friend that I am finally getting to introduce to the a wider audience.
We needed a lot of books to stock the bookcases for the installation and Julia, the assistant producer has been working hard on this and they have sourced 6000, all donated. It feels right that the books have been gifted, there is a lot around gift and exchange with this piece, as with my previous ones, and I am looking forward to the whole thing being separated into units at the end and gifted to schools and libraries. This feel right energetically.
There is a small thrill in being able to choose Rumi and Hafiz poems to be vinyl-printed onto the floor of the ballroom that thousands of people will stop and take in..
Meanwhile I went to Goldsmith’s last week to discuss my R+D project and came back with some interesting ideas and contacts which I am looking into. Saj is on the case developing a network for us to begin working within and we are meeting at the studio next week to discuss.
I began a Creative Partnerships project the other week at Limes Farm school in Essex and will set up a separate blog for this as it runs till July and will be quite an involved process. I am looking forward to sharing my practice in a new environment as it has been a while since I worked with children, having them myself took up all my emotional energy…
