Dear Elise and Fabien

Thank you to both of you for participating in the meringue experiment. I told you that if you took part I would explain why I was posting a meringue to each of you.

From the start of this commission I have felt very aware of the physical distance between the making of the work and the site where it would be displayed. Sculpture has the distinction of having a physical being and putting on an exhibition in St Andrews would mean transporting that physicality to a location several hundred miles away. 526.9 miles to be exact. Thinking about the transport of the work and about its display in a space that is not a gallery, does not have invigilators and will be visited by people who are not necessarily au fait with how art likes to be viewed, i.e. by sight rather than touch have all been factors in how I have conceived of the work and continue to be so.

A good friend of mine has been in hospital with cancer for four months, having previously been well. I’ve not known her that long really but what I noticed about her soon after meeting her was how well she communicated to me her friendship. Not by declaring anything in particular about her affection but just in how she was around me. I noticed this about her and knew to value that quality of hers and took it to heart. I was very sorry to hear about her cancer and am pleased to say that she seems to be getting better, although I don’t know what the prognosis is; she hasn’t told me and I’ve not asked. I noticed one day before she got ill that she was buying a packet of mini meringues and asked her if she was going to make a dessert? No, she said, I just like eating them. So when I heard she was in hospital I bought her a packet of the same meringues I’d seen her buy and took them round to her house for her husband to take in to her in hospital. She was delighted to receive them and told me how much she was enjoying them. I bought her a second lot, a box this time, a different make, but this time in delicately pale rainbow colours. I like making meringues, but my home-made ones are crispy on the outside and marshmallowy on the inside and I don’t think they’d last any kind of packaging or transport. This is why I opted for shop bought ones. I packaged this second lot up and posted them to her in a sturdy box. I didn’t hear anything back from her and when she emailed me to let me know how she was getting on she didn’t mention having received them. Eventually, after two weeks I was curious to know if they’d arrived or not and couldn’t resist asking her if she’d received anything from me by post? She hadn’t. Her husband went to the postal delivery office to see if they were holding the parcel but to no avail. Then, a couple of days later they turned up at her house and he was able to take them in to her.

So, you see, I’d been posting meringues before I had the idea of posting one to each of you. Sending sculptures by road or rail over five hundred miles even by art handler or courier gives rise to some anxieties in me. Would they arrive in their original condition or be damaged, broken, rendered unfit for display? This particular anxiety has caused me to think of the final work as needing to take some kind of indestructible form, or as a facsimile of the originals perhaps. I find this line of thinking quite productive, it’s interesting to consider what is the relationship between the handmade sculpture and its rendering in a form suited to travel and display? I conceived of printed fabric banners showing drawings, or photo-montages, or images of the sculptures or various combinations of all of these. The conditions of production, display, transportation, funding, all play a part in the shape and form that the work takes. This got me thinking about the relationship of a manuscript to the published book. Original manuscripts remain with the author, eventually entering an archive perhaps if the author achieves recognition. The finished edited form of the text is printed as books in numbers and it is these which are distributed, sold, to a public. The owner of any text is then free to do what they will to their copy: to annotate the margins, crease the spine, spill tea on the pages, fold down the corner of the pages to save their place. The physical text is subject to its treatment by its owner. Elise, who has studied the Ernaux’s manuscripts has told me about how interesting they are to look at. About how they are written on used documents, palimpsest-like at the outset, edited in different coloured pencils, worked and reworked over and over. These manuscripts can’t be photographed so she’s not been able to show me but there’s nothing to stop her describing them to me.

Producing work to commission brings with it certain combinations of demands and exigencies. These give rise to fears but making art is in any case a fear-inducing activity. Its herald is sleeplessness, an over-active mind and imagination and the fear is so close to excitement that it’s impossible to know at any moment whether the overall sensation is pleasurable or enervating. It’s both. In the past I’ve sometimes found an analogous activity to the particular kind of creative activity I’m engaged in, as a way of riding those sensations ‘into battle’ if you will. Before a commission for Hove Museum, I took myself off to the end of Brighton Pier and rode on a hideous fairground ride that I would normally not be able to contemplate engaging with. Two long arms swing at great speed 360 degrees round and round over the sea from ground to sky with a capsule at each end in which the willing victim is caged. I thought, if I can endure that then everything else will be easy. This time round, posting a fragile meringue in a loose packet with no padding all the way to Scotland and seeing what state it turned up in seemed a fitting metaphor for my anxieties of transporting original sculpture all that way. Not only that but I have in mind a way in which the photographs you both took of what emerged from the envelope can play their part towards the visualising of themes and motifs from Ernaux’s works. The fragility of life, the fragmentation of experience, the myth of coherence and existential ‘wholeness’. They will feed right back into the images I am making for the exhibition, whether they remain recognisable as such or not.

I think I’ve said a lot about why I posted a meringue to each of you but rather less about where the results will go, but that’s not yet decided. Importantly, having your participation embedded in the work is significant to me, enjoying as I am your companionship, encouragement, scholarship and thinking as vital ingredients in the work.

This has become a bit of an essay. It’s all an essay, an attempt, giving it a go. Seeing where it leads.

In your photographs the sugar forms look to have transmuted themselves into chalk-like samples of the Sussex cliffs, lit by the Scottish sun.

Thank you both.