Bricolage
This blog feels like a room with a grey-coloured wall where bits and pieces of writing and images are pinned up like bricolage.
I never engaged in blogging as a teenager. The only space that I had control over, aside from my bedroom, was the disused dead-end lane behind my family home. For about five years, the lane became a 'gallery' for sculptures that I made from rubbish and detritus gleaned from the neighbourhood, particularly from along the nearby train line. The exhibitions rotated every second week and I ensured that each one focused on a different theme and utilised a different part of the lane. Sometimes objects would hang from the overhanging sheltering branches of an oak tree, other times they'd be dotted around on the ground. Previous works would be dismantled and the materials reused for new sculptures. At the time I wanted to surprise people who walked past and allow them to see the lane in a different light. I don't think it was so much attention seeking borne out of loneliness, as I kept the project completely anonymous, but was simply an opportunity for teenage self expression.
Over the years, I was joined by neighbours who generously contributed bits and pieces to the project. Louise installed some of her geometric paintings on triangle-shaped pieces of wood to the side of a wooden shed that overlooked the lane. Ros pasted up some little etchings of old trees under the canopy of the 100-year-old oak tree. Thinking back to it now, I feel like the project was also a way for me to find company and collaborate with artists and neighbours who I admired. At around the age of 18, I grew out of the project and never returned to it. Although I feel like this blog is an extension of that lane, and perhaps even the longing, that was seeded as a teenager.
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