Yesterday, Fiona and I traveled in her pip sized Fiesta to Colyton Trade School, where the Year Ten English classes will be cabinet-ified in Term 4. The school grounds were eerily vacant except for a flat back of green grass and twig shadows. I found myself taking photographs of concrete atmosphere which is its own form of vacancy. The school full of nothing at all if arriving on the surface but on the inside (all treasures always hidden in the insides!) were rooms of tables, chairs and teachers working deep into the afternoon. It was a year or more ago that I first met English teacher Emma in the architecture of Carriage Works during a conference and we plotted and we planned and we plotted and we planned to bring poems to her school. After patience. In waiting, we, the poems, arrive.
This morn, Bravo Child completed his workshop numeral two with Concord High. The students have decided to build their cabinet of poems into or out of a fridge. Bravo, from a street in the middle of Burwood tells me:
‘Some options were the use of a hollowed out TV with poems on a rotating cylinder or scroll to be played (hand-wound) like a revolving slideshow, use of letterboxes with the letters being poems. But the winning vote was for the adaption of a fridge into a cabinet with poems being displayed on items in the shelves as though they are contents/nutritional information on the products. They also want to include a sound element so I’ve asked them to bring in a sound file or recording they’d like to include”.
The list of lost and found things to bring for next time :
1) Object (Lost & Found)
2) Poem (Fridge related, or pertaining to one of the ideas related to fridges that we came up with in class, such as Food, Consumption, Laziness, Preservation, Igloo, Electronics, Modern etc).
3) Cabinet component (optional)
4) Sound file/ recording (preferably either on CD or as an mp3 or .wav file)
Today Tamryn, Sandra and I have been bubbling around The Red Room Company designing our images to accompany our projects that begin with our trip on a boat to Tasmania in early October.
Now – The strange beeping from the alarm down the stairs has struck itself to my brain membrane and thankfully my body is about to scoot for the final meeting of the day at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
(Hey Ho I am late)
*Spender did
