Artist in residence at the Cambridge Museum of Technology

Today, pouring with rain, but managed to start creating the darkroom from the porta-cabin. I have organised two different school groups to come in and do some pin-hole photography and digital photography. It was fun bringing in some ply-wood that I had measured up for last week to fit in the windows, and along with some very black sticky tape, will be able to keep as much light out as possible. Hoping to borrow some pin-hole cameras. The theme that is emerging is the use of new and old technologies and what could be better than the low and high tech. cameras that the children will be using. Watch this space… the residency continues!

An interesting day. It doesn’t feel that I have actually done very much, but have looked around and got a feel of the place, a sense of its size, its sprawling ground and building; it has a sense of being from a by-gone era, an anachronism in the present day, in the 21st century. Machines, analogue, not digital, large wooden, dials. Piles everywhere - a classic sense of things being given to the museum of having been left there. Rather than “throw them away”, they have remained. Plans and maps of projects unfulfilled, lottery bids that have gone un-won. A love and commitment to the place by people who volunteer, who choose, to spend their time with the engines. A mythology is already emerging - one of the volunteers remembers crawling on the floor of the engine room when his Dad used to polish and perhaps tinker wiht the engines. another man is reminded of his Mum who used to be a comtometer operator. At lunch, going to Tesco, incongruous next-door neighbour to the pumping station. Walking up the slope into moern day life. Tesco seemed alienating and brash, plastic, signs purely functional, no artistic thought or effort.

So what will this residency bring - I have thirty days, a day a week over six months.

Already the ideas are flowing - perhaps too many ideas, but that is how the first few weeks will go. I want to set up a darkroom in one of the cabins. Have written a spider diagram of my ideas… A good day, a good beginning. Met R and T who came to visit. R lives on a boat and wants to campaign against the restrictions being put on the people who live there and make a photographic exhibition to show in August this year.  And T. who wants to make his living as an artist and photographer. I want him so much to succeed and all barriers to his success swept out of his way!