I organised our second caving residency to the Mendips in preparation for the Hollow Chambers exhibition. Denise, Silvia, Jeremy and I returned to the MCG cottage during a members weekend so that we could form stronger links with the club for our Hollow Chambers exhibition. To gain the post graduate funding we needed to include an outside organisation in our project the MCG was perfect. I organised for Bill Chadwick the president of the club to take us to a new cave, Read’s Cavern. This cave had a stream which gave the added dimension of water to our experience. It was the weekend after heavy snow fall on the Mendips and the water was cascading in the stream and dripping from the stalactites in profusion. We also returned to Goats church Cavern to continue our investigations. Silvia, Jeremy and Denise interviewed Bill and Jeremy about their love of caving and the transcripts were exhibited in the archive at the Hollow Chambers exhibition. Silvia and Jeremy also took digital photographs of the MCG club’s archive which were also exhibited in the exhibition.

This residency I thought a lot about who controls space. The caves we visited were open access. Anyone could visit but what other factors control who enters? A visitors attitude to darkness, water, rock, crawling, climbing, wearing welly boots and old clothes. Going into the unknow, into a different environment.

During the residency I focused on taking films of water dripping from the cave walls and forming, destroying, reforming the stalactites. The movement of the water, its sound, its ability to find a way through the rock, the minerals it carries and deposits. Water infiltrates space. It travels through the cracks, the fissures. To infiltrate a space you can squeeze through the cracks.

My mobile phone broke with a software problem the week after the trip so I lost my films of the water dripping. That made me focus more on the feelings surrounding the space. How can I draw fissures? What flows and drips like water? The investigation of the Pewter drawings began.