Don’t I just love all this new technology! Here I am, being thrown out of Tractie at the ungodly hour of five in the afternoon – and on a friday, too! –  having time to kill until the lecture at Expodium I want to go to starts. So I went to Expodium a bit early and am now beavering away at my laptop posting this new post via their Internet connection. Love it!

Did the second lecture by Annette Balkema at IBB this morning. Again – very interesting. Will post about it shortly.

Then I went to Tractie to do some work on labyrinth no. 2.  Remember no 01 being made with painters tape and the hard time I had removing that? It’s in one of my earlier posts.  Today I took thinner and cleaned off the sticky lines where the tape had been and had collected lots of chaff. If the layout of labyrinth no 1 had been a bit more interesting I could have used these sticky lines, but it wasn’t interesting enough. Will store the idea of using lines of sticky stuff attracting fluffy bits, though.

Well, removing glue with thinner was only making me high because of the fumes. Funny thing is, having  twice spent hours cleaning this floor made me connect with it in a totally new way. For the first time, I really noticed its bumps and ridges, and the way the sun reflects off the gray paint. 

I’ve been reading ‘Second Nature” again, and my feeling towards the newly-cleaned floor sparked off a quote (page 70): ” That Rochdale should have founded a quasi-religious movement – and that the compost pile should have emerged as a status symbol among American gardeners – makes perfect sense when you consider the attitudes Americans have traditionally held toward the land. The apotheosis of compost is really just the latest act in a long-running morality play about the American people and the American land. In the garden writer’s peaeans to compost you can still hear echoes of Jefferson’s agrarian ideal, paraphrased by Henry Nash Smit:  “Cultivating the earth confers a valid title to it;  the ownership of the land, by making the farmer independant, gives him social status and dignity, while constant contact with nature makes him virtuous …”.

So, by analogy, having had constant contact with cleaning fluids and cleaning the floor of tractie twice confers a valid title. It’s mine, all mine ….  Consider my new found status, and dignity, too.

The real  pleasure in store for me was starting labyrinth no 2. I used painters tape for labyrinth no 1, which did give me a feel for how big a labyrinth should be, but had no poetry. For this second try I use  wool strips that I have felted and am now taping  to the floor. I use a circular design this time, a true labyrinth, no. 1 was a maze really. In a labyrinth there is no need to find a way through, all you do is start at the beginning, trust yourself to the way and it will lead you inwards. And of course , having reached the center, back outwards again.

I will encourage people to close their eyes and follow the labyrinth lines with (unshod) feet.  I tried it today and the feeling is actually rather neat. Will make a part of the labyrinth run on the wall, so as to have people use their hands, too. Maybe film hands/feet?  We’ll see. Maybe I will leave the thing unfinished, this heap of material lying next to the spiral gives an idea of  where-will-this-line-go-next that I quite like. Give it a few more turns to connect the wall more I think, then stop.