A table puppet in the making ...

Playing Truant

Excuse me for going home this afternoon. I just couldn't do it any more.

You see, when you spend weeks being given incredible skills, having creative doorways opened for you, it gets to a point where unless you go home and sleep, and process all of this wonderment and decide what on earth to do with it, it is pointless.

We've learnt how to communicate a message by making a puppet.

How to communicate a message by using an object.

How to communicate a message by manipulating light sources.

We've been given a tool box which for me is exciting beyond belief, but the downside is that I am so exhausted I can't think straight. That is why I need to be here, home, trying to remember what I originally intended to do with this degree.

I think it's time to just..........um...........try and put something together. To take the plunge, stop procrastinating, pondering, speculating..........and just start making something that is mine, comes from my brain, no matter how sketchy, how amateurish, how naive. Wasn't that why I did this in the first place?

Part of the exhaustion of the past 24 hours stems from a visit I made after school yesterday, to the Mayfair Squat. Two people from my course told me they were going to a squat in an exclusive street in Mayfair, central London, to prepare for a performance they are putting on tomorrow involving a painter and a pianist. They told me this squat had become a collaborative artistic eutopia. I was tired, and feeling a little run down, but gut overruled brain and I knew I had to go with them.

It is exhausting to be over-inspired. It truly takes the life force out of you.

Past immaculately-suited Park Lane businessmen we stroll beneath huge, ornate buildings with vast windows....shiny black chauffer-driven vehicles whizz up and down the road....there is an exclusive-looking restaurant on one side of the road. On the other.......a fairly neutral but majestic building, with one enigmatic, hand made flag hanging over the entrance. The massive wooden door has a handwritten squatters' rights sign fastened to it. We knock for ages, no answer. This building is five storeys high after all. Finally a small, foreign guy wearing a beanie lets us in and disappears back into the labyrinth. My friends try to find their contact. I follow, up sweeping staircases, along passageways, across landings.

Its hard to express my feelings. Imagine you had a dolls' house in which you had invented a make-believe artistic hideaway, filled with mysterious nooks and crannies, distant melodies, treasure, and a variety of characters each with an interesting story to tell. Then imagine you became tiny and were able to explore it, wide-eyed.

On the bottom floor, a dozen bicycles belonging to the temporary and permanent inhabitants who constantly came and went through the wooden door. A huge drawing room, in which some people were constructing what looked like a treehouse with inter-connecting bridge. The next floor up.........we pass through a room containing a maze lined by doors. We twist and turn through the room, catching occasional glimpses through the gaps, of peoples' private dens and studios. On the top floor, a girl and a boy are creating a kind of glade surrounded by an arc of tree branches. There is the smell of burning sage.

What huge potential has this £6 million disused, high-ceilinged, expansive mansion.

After clearing timber, lugging a piano and sweeping the floor I leave with my head in a whirlwind.