Friday 6.15pm.

Already on the sofa: Relocation, Relocation on the TV, have seen it ! Cup of tea in a china cup and a bag of cheese n onion crisps, bliss !
Unfortunately I am full of cold again so the sofa and I are an item for the night...nothing too energetic for me tonight except for lifting my large glass of red later.

I am glad to get this week out of the way; it has been a bit of a learning curve...a realisation of where I can go wrong and do. I enjoy the work at college so much that when starting a new module I can go off doing ...... lots of different things instead of keeping to one idea and seeing where I can go with it. For example; I was working with coal, had begun by carving into a piece of it, with some success but a cloud of coal dust in the air stopped me and my brain from realising that this was something worth exploring; instead I liked it but couldn't stop myself going onto something else.
What I ought to have done was get another piece of coal, gone outside ( coal dust cloud and losing friends in studio ) or seen if the workshop was open again, trying out what else I could do.
Within a couple of hours I had wrapped a small flat shiny piece of coal in a thin layer of lead; another tangent but I did like the contrast of the lead against the coal.

Crows Nest Park but more importantly the house set inside it was once owned by the Hague family who owned many mines in the area. Before coal mining was regulated anyone who had land could start up a mine and employ whoever they wanted to work there. The wealth that the mining industry brought to the area along with textiles and glass production gave the family the wealth to extend the house and landscape the gardens giving it the grandeur that resonates still.

Miles of tunnels underneath the landscape and images of the dark, eerie conditions in sharp contrast to the opulence above.