Play.

I had a lot of fun today in the house – I much prefer to work practically when I’m there and then reflect later, though the writing tasks we receive often unearth things I wouldn’t have thought of. However, today was a day of practical work and, to that end, I played.

Firstly, I was displaced from the Fisherman’s Shed by necessity of being caught on the camera, so I had to find an unpopulated space to unlock my writing from Friday. Partly out of practicality (as no one seemed to have chosen it) I chose one of the liminal spaces in the house – the stairs. Now, the memory which I was attempting to activate was that of playing on the stairs at my mum’s workplace so, I began experimenting, trying to find different ways to ascend and descend the staircase (bearing in mind the ideas of making strange the everyday that we had discussed earlier). First, I bumped down the stairs on my bum, which was slightly painful – Louise, who was working on the landing at the time, joined in on that one. Then I started to get a little more dangerous. As children, we are all told (I assume) not to play on the stairs, as it is a tad risky. I’m sure in the minds of most parents, if they see children playing on the stairs they immediately picture horrifying images of broken bones, concussions and trips to the hospital after a tumble down them. However, today, there were no parents – of course, there were doubters, wondering at the danger of what I was attempting but I (foolishly perhaps) refused to listen and went about my experimentation. I slid down the stairs on my front and back, jumped up the stairs, increasing the amount of steps I jumped up them every time, crawled up them (a rather pedestrian attempt), walked down them backwards and walked up and down them with my eyes closed (this after discussing with Louise and Angela the horrible feeling of thinking there’s another step and there not being one there, and lurching forward into the dark). Sliding down on my front is my new way of traversing the stairs, so none of you be alarmed if I do it again.

In the end though, the stairs couldn’t yield up any more interesting ways to use them so I went in search of something else. I found a feather duster.

Initially, I took the duster because it entertained me – it was large and inherently quite a ridiculous thing. But then, when I took it upstairs I had a bizarre urge to dust at all the cameras. In the beginning, it was just because the idea of a big feather duster slowly creeping up onto the camera amused me greatly. But, slowly, as I went round all the cameras grinning, I started to think through and rationalise my actions – there was a method to my madness. When we’re in the house, the CCTV tends to fade away into the background (as a few people have mentioned already). What I wanted to do, with my rituals of cleaning (first the duster, then spray and cloth, and finally the hoover) was to make obvious the cameras. With my escalating cleaning rituals, I separated the CCTV from the rest of the house, isolating it and inverting the focus in each room.

Eventually, however, I ran out of cleaning implements and had to find another way to amuse myself. This is when I truly settled on play. Before now I’d been playful in my exploration, but I’d not truly played as a child would. So I became a pirate.

The idea of setting sail on the seven seas and becoming a scurvy sea-dog came to me in the bathroom, when I was changing the toilet roll as I noticed the current one had been finished. Through the eyes of a grown-up, t’was but a simple cardboard tube. However, through the eyes of a child, it was a telescope! Next, I turned my child’s eye towards the bins just outside the toilet. Bins? No, they aren’t bins, they’re my pirate ship! (Though, size-wise, it was more like a little pirate dinghy) And what’s this? One of the flappy bin lids came of? Well, that looks rather like a pirate hat to me! Unfortunately, sailing the seven seas may be a bit hard without a sail… But, luckily, I found a handy oar in the form of a fire extinguisher!

You may be wondering what exactly the point was in all of this seemingly pointless play. Earlier, we talked a great deal about the idea of ‘making strange’ a place – mainly how Gob Squad’s Work ‘sought to ‘make strange’ the activity’  (Govan, n.d.). When you’re looking through the eyes of a child, mundane household objects can become magical, fun and strange. In that way, I played my pirate game to fully experience the making strange of the house and to observe the reactions of everyone else. First of all, I simply played on the landing in my bin-boat, but I wasn’t really engaging anyone that way. So I began a hunt for treasure. Understandably, considering where we are, treasure was hard to come by, even through the eyes of youth. I systematically went through each room (with my bin lid hat and cardboard telescope to make it quite clear I was a pirate) searching for the elusive treasure. Then, in the reception/waiting room, I found some shiny gold tacks! I even found a treasure-chest facsimile to put them all in (I haven’t a clue what it was, it was a strange folding silver thing). Now that I had succeeded in my pirate’s quest to find a buried treasure, I decided on philanthropy so that I could involve everyone in the house – I went room to room offering everyone some of my treasure. I was genuinely surprised by the result though – pretty much everyone accepted my offer of treasure, even though the treasure was clearly just drawing pins and a few other brass bits and bobs. The only people in the house who didn’t accept my offer were those in the CCTV room – except Lizzy, but she was outside the room at the time. This got me wondering, is there something about the CCTV room that separates you from the rest of the house? Because within the room you observe everyone else’s actions, do you feel apart from them – it’s an interesting idea that whenever you watch people through the CCTV you feel detached from the house.

That or they just didn’t want any of my treasure.

References:

Govan, n.d. Revisioning Space, The Place of the Artist, [e-journal] P. 123, Available through: Lincoln University Blackboard: http://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk.