Day Six

Over the weekend in the car, our conversations drifted back to the Pagoda and what we would both like to get out of our time spent in The Office as The Unexpected Guests. We talked about being creative and what it means to us. 

Recently, we had a meeting in FACT and were asked: If you had all of the money in the world what you do? 

I would paint and write, Mr Campbell would write lyrics and produce music. So that was a start. Why don't we do that now? We don't have time. Why don't we make time? We need to be in the right frame of mind and basically lots of other excuses. I spent Sunday morning in the little bedroom searching through photographs and a book on Chinese translation. I found the photographs and they are exactly as I remember them but I could not find the book, it must be in the loft.

We discussed how we needed to do this kind of exercise of searching and reading to re-connect with things we had done before to get back to a place where we felt we could start making again. We both work with stories.This residency has given us the space to start thinking again.

Today I started to draw one of the sailors from a photograph. His name is Baby Face. I decided to draw with charcoal. Mr Campbell worked on a sound work. We sat in the office at our desk with Kelly one of the apprentices in the middle. Kelly read out words from a box of children's Chinese flash cards. We copied what she was saying. It was both hard and funny. We filmed it all.   

Very young children were learning to play Chinese instruments in the main hall with Mr Liu. 

We went to the Wah Sing to catch up with our dear friend C.K.Cheung, it is always a pleasure to see him. He told me to keep writing but not to  exaggerate because people will not believe me. "Just write the way it is".