A book I found, its cover bleached on one half by the light over time. I immediately saw, projected onto it, a spectral figure...one as in M.R James’s The Mezzotint. It was one of those works that make themselves.

I took some bleach and made the figure. The scratch appeared somehow, it felt right to me, and made me think of a scratch or blemish on the lens of a camera, or those marks taken for ghosts in the early days of photography.

Using the bleach, seeing it take a minute for the mark it makes to appear, reminds me of developing photographs in a dark room, back in the last century.

I am remembering a pinhole camera workshop we did at the Tramway when the boys were wee. My photograph was of Lorna and Jude against a wall in the sunlight. That photo is somewhere, inside a book, hidden from the light in the dark of a book to stop it fading.


Cromer beach. 2007. East International artists outing along the coast from Norwich to swim in the sea and eat fish and chips. But not in that order it seems.
We alight from the train and muster around the fish and chip shop. Jeff Dennis is complaining that surely it should be a swim first then fish and chips. I totally agree. But it is too late –(hypen here) the order has been placed and the order is set.
Pretty good fish and chips.
The North sea is grey/green and freezing, (comma here) devoid of any glamour. This is the steely grim bit between that part of England and Holland. I am thinking eels, cod, crabs. The beach is stoney.
Some of the artists need a bit of persuading to get in cold water and some are far to cool to even harbour the thought. Lynda (Morris) persuades and coerces the faint of heart. In we go.
Me and Lynda when we have met have often spoke of Sickert, who she has written on. I am thinking here of a Sickert painting in Liverpool, his Bathers in Dieppe. The figures wading in “ the snot-green scrotum-tightening sea” as James Joyce calls it.
We come out refreshed, skin tingling, glad we went in. But Jeff was right: swim first, eat second.