Saturday 8 June 2019

The drop.

All the Phoria work gets done in an old building with little turrets and ledges and plenty of outdoor ornamentation. To get in off the lumpy sloping tarmac driveway, you have to take a couple of stairs and walk a few feet perpendicular to the house entrance along a small walkway, snazzily tiled. I walked there yesterday in the rain, for the first time in a while.

The house is large with high ceilings and contains a few people who tend to keep their car very clean. The ground floor belongs to us. The studio is positively regal.

Birds, mainly of the pigeon breed, tend to congregate on one of the ledges at the front of the building that overhangs the walkway. The ledge is about two foot long and sits about fifteen feet above the very halfway point of the passage. This means there is always a generous smattering of pigeon shit on the walkway that you have to avoid when you enter. Yesterday, in the wet—and I assume in some part down to a bountiful springtime—the gifts were plentiful and took the form of a kind of paper-mache vomit that leaked across the walkway. On a dry day of anticipated volume you can sidestep the lot by taking a simple detour around the petrified splats, but with nothing acting as a damn to stem the flow on this sodden and particularly productive day (perhaps a dead rat would have done it?) I had to make a small jump over the creamy river. I still slipped a little when I landed, and wasn’t sure if I’d cleared the whole lot. I looked at the bottom of my shoes and there were a few specks here and there.

I was able to wipe my shoes on the bin bags piled up by the studio door, but one of them split open and a half-eaten banana and what looked like a bit of chicken juice or something leaked out onto the carpet.

I had to tread through a fair few sandwich packets and clear three mugs off the chair—each carrying a different coloured moulding residue—before I could sit down and we could talk art.

Achieve.

All milky and lava-lamp-ish the street-lights reflecting on my big red car bonnet as I curl it round at night all sound and echoing engine...