Installing the Tunnel Shrines

5.30, Monday evening, and it’s drizzling outside and I’m bent over, moving along the passageway under the Pump House towards the lights Olivia and Caroline have brought to help them work on their shrines. No other sounds except the echoing chink of Caroline’s hammer and feet shuffling in the grit and dust. There’s a kind of peace in the bricked tunnels cut off from the aboveground evening, and I feel a slowing down of the day as we concentrate on the ideas for our spaces. I swing the torch round the area I’ve chosen, and my hand and hair brush against cobwebs - not thin paltry ones but well matured growths with a real presence of their own!

Alone in the subterranean architecture of vacant brick openings and rusting pipework we’re thinking about the idea of loss. The openings of the mammoth pipes, empty & silent, stretch further back underground than we can ever go – it’s easy to think of them as opening into the past. If I could crawl through where would I end up?

I’m thinking how to convey a sense of this with no need for explanations, playing with an idea until the idea says what we want it to say. And then we’ll leave it alone in the dark where no-one will see it, no visitors will come up close and make something of their own out of it. Just the objects being there in their own right will be enough.