Cleaning is Barbaric

Cleaning is Barbaric

I am not loading up any photographs today. It is strange how images have dictated, or led my blogging so far. (I so need to find another word to replace ‘blogging’ as it is crude tasteless word).

Today I continued cleaning the space on the third floor. It is difficult to transfer from a mindset of subtle responses to the driven desire to get what you want to communicate right and clear. While I was cleaning I made huge amounts of dust and swept some interesting dust mountains/islands, which collected up and put into a bucket.

Why is cleaning barbaric? It involves applying a conformist almost regimentally minimal aesthetic to a place/environment. It also aspires to removing the traces of others and time. I collected up all the bits of wallpaper, and plaster that was on the floor along with huge amounts of dust. But, to alleviate my guilt from barbaric cleaning, I have kept all that I cleared up; it is all in plastic buckets. Old paper is really beautiful, even if it is rubbish.

I am keeping some bolts of fabric leaning up against the walls, this gives me lots more floor space to work with, but also gives me more relics of the rooms previous owner and state. The yellow wallpaper pink person collection is still hiding behind the door. This makes sense here, but I feel a need to label it or organise it in a museological manner.

I am now becoming much happier with the space in which I am going to generate a large expansive space, the landscape is going to come out more, but allow me to be more experimental and less representational with the materials and objects that I use.

I am currently writing this in the elsewhere shop window. Artists here are exhibits.