loose parts

 This has felt like another Covid week where just muddling through is enough.  The house has gone on the market and we have some offers and that feels a little bit stressful as moving is now a reality.  I wrote some reluctant field notes about Monday as when I got home I decided that the loose parts stuff had slipped off the platform and so the territory of the PhD in terms of the space of the research had extended.  This is an interesting idea and makes me think of the notion of territory.

In my notes I realised that I am actually managing to step away from doing workshops and handing the space over to the kids and the staff in a way I haven't done before.  I think this is about agency and seeing your mark or at least your influence and this is very different to making art although it may be part of what I am describing as residency as method.   The ability to step away and imagine different types of territory feels like a very different space to normal.  The bits and bobs are getting moved around and there is clearly an area where the kids have made something that could be an open plan den.  So to an extent without my direct intervetion in making something is happening.  Part of me wants to go and sit and just observe for a while - I may even try and draw something a bit like John Berger doing portaits,  I just thought of this as i wrote and then I decided it would be something to do.  I should probably wait until June though.

I have had to think about how I start to work in this space without taking over and I think perhaps it will have to start off by introducing materials - I will do a cardboard day.  I also thought it is timely as I can move lots of old stuff from my workshop, finally find a new home for my prosthetic leg that has followed me around for 20 years.  This will be interesting to see the things I have kept for a rainy day become part of the detritus of the playground.  

There will be an issue about how messy things get and if things need to be put away and if we need a churn of materials its quite nice to have some practical concerns as a distraction.  I am going to fit the big slide we have salvaged next week - this will not be part of the platform of my research so I will not have to write field notes at least not in the abstraction of the present.