C.S. I. : Co-operation Scene Investigation

Thought it was high time I put up some pictures of what I got up to at Esra Oskay and Rocio Jungenfeld's 'Weaving Plants' project in the glasshouse at Lauriston Castle last year.

Rocio and Esra were exploring the theme of 'home' - here's my contribution.

I took the microscope along on the bus and pottered round collecting 'evidence' of all kinds of normal interactions and life processes, looking particularly for traces of co-operation, commensalism, mutualism, kindness and fun. Because I wanted to do a sort of inverse of C.S.I. (the telly programme), I wore sensible shoes.

The tiny seedling is a bean from Esra's piece, the micrographs of fibres are mostly from Rocio's, there are photos of a dead wasp and drawings of some of the tiny worms I found in there.

The glasshouse is regularly used for craft workshops, so in addition to the traces of art working going on at the time and of the activities and bodies of the diverse organisms that made the glasshouse their habitat, there were all kinds of bits of glitter and other shiny coloured things nestling in the dust.

I called my own piece 'who's coming to bed with me then?'. The blanket is made of photographs, micrographs and drawings from the glasshouse, along with an assortment of other pictures I have been making and collecting.

One of the things I spent a long time doing was printing digital images onto the thickest, most heavily textured hand made paper I could stuff into my battered old Epson Stylus. The point being that anything that smacks of a dichotomy needs to be enveloped with Messy Reality as soon as possible. (The printer didn't like it, we had words.)

Colours were taken from studies of the lovely autumn skies and grounds of the castle. The bed was made of anything I could find, and the delicious bed-time drink is a nutritious filamentous algal concoction from a puddle behind an outhouse.