Day 5 (part 2). A recording of the sound of a river in torrent is my almost constant companion in the studio, I can adjust the volume so that sometimes the river seems distant and sometimes the sound drowns out the possibility of hearing any other sound. When I rest on the floor with my eyes closed, the sound can take me through my imagination, to many wild places.
I make ‘riverscapes’, in response to the sound on the floor of the studio, pouring water from a can or painting precise meanders with a brush, all disappear after a time into the atmosphere, depositing a thin layer of salt and chemical residue as it evaporates.
I play in the remaining puddles on the floor, the landscape suddenly shifting back into scale with my own body dimensions. The lakes become puddles that I walk through leaving footprints that briefly mark my travel across the space.
All these adventures take place within a shifting landscape of various assembled pieces of furniture, glasswear and stools. The stools are placed so that I can sit and contemplate on them or so they can give me greater height and a different perspective over the landscape within the room.
The water in the containers magnifies and changes the surroundings with its lens like qualities. The large glass egg shapes invert the room when filled with water like the lens of an eye, so the watery landscape is filled with illusions of dimension and form.
While I make water ways with my footprints through the objects I brush against a large glass vessel on a tripod that hold a plastic Virgin Mary bottle full of holy water from Knock, the vessel and its glass lid crash to the floor and break. The plastic holy water bottle is still intact.

Day 8. I return to the city of Coventry after a day of rest at home and a day at work, co-running a creative group, working in the natural landscape on the edge of my hometown Oxford. The work involves taking time at the change of each season, with a group of people, to have a sense of the land and its seasonal shifts by spending time in silence in a local wood.
While I am at home I take time to buy a replacement for the broken glass vessel and lid.
Once back in Coventry and at the University, I enter my studio. The watery landscape that I left on the floor two days before, has dried up, leaving maps like the contour lines on an OS map, of its existence.
I turned on the sound of the river in torrent, which fills the room.
I begin the day feeling uninspired and follow already tried actions of pouring water onto the floor to create maps. I find that the creative process cannot be easily forced, or the result can appear lifeless, I abandoned the line of work, turned up the sound of the river and allowed it to percolate!
I realised that I was trying to create a set ‘performance’ to be able to show during the week of Summer Dance. A performance was not and is not a necessary result of the time that I spend working here, it is a ‘Making Space”.
As I experiment, I notice that the work is most interesting to me and most alive when I am investigating a line of action within which the outcomes are open, through creating an open score. When this is not the case, I can often feel as though I am creating a ‘performance’ and perhaps also creating a character to be in the performance. It can feel dull and forced and self-conscious AND I imagine could appear the same to the viewer.
I spend the day in the studio catching up, downloading photographs, writing, reading and taking notes and fiddling about. I begin to once again feel on the right track once I stop trying to force the issue. There are plenty of possibilities here, I trust the experience I have gained over the years, there is much work experience, both in working on my own and in collaboration with others, that I have hardly ever fully articulated to myself, let alone to or with others who work in a similar stream.

Day 9. I arrived in the studio at around 8.30 and decided to clear the room, putting everything to the edge of the space. Somehow I again let the glass lid I have just replaced, slip to the floor, once again a breakage! I am obviously going to have to move the holy water elsewhere!
Once the room is cleared, I begin to assess the room and the objects anew. I have been editing out objects from the collection of stuff I brought with me, since the beginning of the residency. I began on day 1, by putting everything I had brought into the room, a car full of stuff, placing each object into the space, inhabiting the ‘landscape’ with objects!
Now I start to work from the opposite perspective, by adding only what I want to work with directly. Including actively deciding whether or not to include the sound of the running water.
In came the three glass spheres the size of ostrich eggs, in came a stool, in came the largest vessel and in came the vessel on the tripod, now lidless that had held the Virgin Mary holy water from Knock!
I decided to only work with the sound scape that working with the egg shapes creates and omit the sound of the river from the room. I filled both of the vessels with the less than holy water from the shower and began to explore the different characters of the three egg shapes. In the water, filled with water in the water, out of the water and filled with water, hearing their sounds, and the sounds of glass on glass, working with their endless lens like possibilities. I actively include my feet and hands in the water filled vessels with the egg shapes.
The fewer objects that I have in the space the more, paradoxically, it seemed full of possibility. It felt like the difference between a rainstorm and the particularity of one drop of dew, the macro and the micro landscapes of drops of water. It felt creatively freeing to narrow everything down.
At the same time, I somehow felt that I didn’t need to take it all so seriously, when I remembered this residency wasn’t all about creating a ‘performance’.
Back to experimentation and the work became alive and interesting once more. There is of course room for performance to be a process of experimentation particularly when working inside an open score, such as the one I had created by editing out most of the objects in the space and said to myself, “experiment!”
Later in the day, I bought the waders that I had spotted in the market!