There are these two young fish swimming along,

and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

I’ve just been reading that article that you mentioned Jess [an adaptation of a lecture given by David Foster Wallace in the review section of the Guardian, 20.09.08 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/20/fiction].

I thought it was really interesting what you said about awareness and how that relates to the project. It seems to be all there in the title “What do artists do?” but maybe that can seem like an external question, as if asked by someone who isn’t an artist, or by one artist to another, or as if we might just be debating or contrasting personal approaches or models, but models that we know – studio based v project based, making objects v ideas / events, commercial v non-commercial etc. I think it’s more subtle than that, asking questions of what it is that we don’t realise we’re doing. Like fish not knowing what water is. The things we’re wet with, without even realising it - not the ideas in the work, or the subject or the content or the form or the relation of any of those things but the way you go about being and doing and the assumptions you make that mean you reject certain activities and directions. Yes, maybe more that, the things you don’t do, the things that don’t touch you, aren’t your methods, the negative space of what artists do.

And why should travelling to a light industrial estate in Clapton help? But I think it does, perhaps because it can act as a container or a frame for things. A distancing. And I thought that the water is all the daily stuff we’re embedded in too. Like what you might pass on your daily journeys or read in the paper. I particularly like the way you’ve incorporated what you’ve seen in the newspaper into what you’ve been doing during the project – the phone videos on the blog and the images you’ve been painting.

Being here and thinking about being here.