Laundry Daze

I worked several summers at Kneels Laundry in Exeter as a youngster - I guess I was 16 or 17 the first year and did three in a row. It was pretty hard work, we started early, had short lunch breaks and finished around 4pm. I bought a copy of the Who's 'Tommy' album with the first couple weeks wages. The first year I was put into the ground floor folding over pillowcases and putting them through the drier rollers - pretty soul destroying labour being both repetitive and in the noisy humid environment. I very nearly got the sack once as I put a 'tiger in your tank' Shell sticker through the machine "to see what would happen". The belt began to tear away from its metal strips and all the pillowcases emerged with the tiger imprinted on them! I was lucky that the foreman (a nice young lad I recall) took pity on me, got an engineer to fix the belt and whisked the printed on cases back round the system.

In the second year I got lucky and was transferred upstairs...here we sorted the incoming laundry and fed it down the chutes to the hothouse below. Upstairs there were fewer of us, the windows were open and the atmosphere altogether nicer. Our single drawback was that the incoming could be fairly disgusting - we kept a stick handy for opening those baskets(fortunately fairly few) with contents that included a liberal dosage of rotting foodstuffs and maggots! On the other hand once everything was in and through the chutes we got a few minutes or more occasionally before clocking off for the day. Here is another of the washers (the top guys on the factory floor) checking with 'us upstairs' that everything is through for the day.

Why Laundry Daze? Well another very occasional task (for volunteers only) was going into the enormous dry cleaning drums to scrub them down...a few hours inside of which gave one a really rosy view of the world...

The Window Block - Last Week...

Exactly what it says on the tin... I especially love the introduction of 'bas-relief'!

Getting Into The Art Business

I can't remember what I saw the first time I walked into Birmingham's contemporary art gallery, the Ikon, in early September 1974. It wasn't the show that's shown above I'm pretty sure of that. Located then in the Shopping Centre built over the rail station it was quite an intimidating place - you entered through glass doors into a long narrow space that seemingly was uninhabited (it was only at the far end that there was an assistant/invigilator) and if there was any signage to indicate that it was free and accessible I don;t recall it.

Nonetheless that first time was truly intoxicating - I'd visited Museums and Art Galleries before (as a student plenty of times to the local museum and on trips to London oodles of commercial spaces as well as the Tate etc.) but other than the small Exe Gallery in Exeter (attached to the art school) I knew nothing of the (then) developing network of Arts Council funded contemporary venues across the UK of which Ikon was one of the most prominent.

But I was hooked...from then on I went regularly throughout my time as a post graduate student at the Art School, in the year I spent as a Cheltenham Fellow and the year after when I was ostensibly studying for my PGCE (but really spending most of my time in my studio painting). So much so that eventually (stints of casual jobs and dole intervening) as I was known to the staff by then I was encouraged to apply for one of three JCP (Job Creation Programme funded by Government) opportunities on offer. I jumped at the chance to get my foot in the door.