Albert arrived with the film. He also brought Alan "Gunga" Purvis, the Scottish percussionist extraordinaire who along with Albert and Jody Gilbert will be performing improvised musical works as part of today's program of happenings.

Much as I suspected, the light in the Cheese Hall is lackluster, and, worse, many of the images have the quality of being an exercise, rarely breaking through from the idea into...

This is the thing. I came here to engage with this place and to see if I could make artworks worth the effort. I also, given my own interest in still life as an approach, was interested in the whole Dutch tradition of Still Life in painting, and thought that by taking this on as a form I could both explore and learn while trying to create here. Of course, formal exercise is not in itself enough: I didn't come all the way here to practice scales. Given the work I did at Elsewhere (trying to use objects to "enact" narrative passages through a performative modality), and the ideas behind the earlier Bottle photographs (that they stood for people and how they expressed light as a spiritual metaphor), an artistic tradition that embraced an ethic of "in the words of St Thomas Aquinas ‘a corporeal metaphor of things spiritual’"
promised to be right up my alley.

I like the idea of talking about the things that interest me, as well as the people I meet and the experiences I have, through photographs of objects arranged out on a table. So far so good. I also like inviting people to bring me things they think are interesting for me to add to the mix. It echoes nicely Monique's soup piece, where people contribute and then the final result is shared (even while it remains Monique who is doing the cooking). Still in order for it to really work it's going to take time, and practice before it becomes a fully fledged way of working.

For example: Still Lifes often have immediately recognizable "returns" (by this I mean a trope that can serve as an identifying characteristic) such as a skull or a scale or a butterfly that symbolizes rebirth, etc. Do I go out and get a pewter water beaker because that says "Still Life" like nobody's business? Of course not, that would be cliche, even cheesy in a not good way (unless I got a nice glass one, ummm). What's more, part of what makes still lifes compelling is their technical difficulty. It is easier to take a photo of a pear than to paint one well. Not to privilege painting however, because in some ways it is easier to paint a pear than it is to photograph one well. But I digress.

What is it that makes a still life come alive? Resonate with significance? Knock you out?

Love. And I can spot it's absence a mile away.