New York, October 2013

In October 2013 I went out to Flux Factory, Long Island City, New York for a month long residency that was dubbed 'Fluxington Mill'. This project grew out of an ongoing relationship with Islington Mill and Flux Factory which began with a residency exchange in 2011.
In 2013 I was very fortunate to be one of a group of delegates from Islington Mill, including artists Volkov Commanders and Maurice Carlin, to head out to New York.

Flux Factory is a real inspiration – a collective that is vibrant and ever changing with a raw edge and an incredible energy.
This was a whirlwind month that saw new friendships, trans-Atlantic connections, collaborations and a lot of exploring.
From playing an alien, in a film for a scrap-yard drive-in movie, to collaborating on performance for an epic Halloween event presented by Cheryl and The Volkov Commanders, I still managed to squeeze in the creation of a site-specific work of my own for our one-night-only Islington Mill evening of happenings at Flux Factory.

'Hole' is a site-specific temporary piece I created within Flux Factory. The building used to be a greetings card factory and within the gallery space is a functioning conveyor belt that goes to nowhere – its motors still operational, but its role redundant. I was captivated by this piece of machinery, both melancholic and imposing, with its grinding, squealing rollers and an occasional spit of grease in protest.

I covered the belt in a loop, with a 14 metre roll of paper, onto which I collaged little pencil and watercolour drawings. These were images of a series of characters standing on branches that stretched out from the edges of the roll.
Each branch was a platform for characters pre-occupied with their own activity; isolated like little islands or prisons. At a fixed point I projected an image of a falling figure onto the roll. When the conveyor belt was turned on it gave the impression of a figure falling down a bottomless hole, an Underworld, passing characters that have been cast into their own isolated positions and eternities.