warehouse wall-painting

[helenic]

A couple of weeks ago I went over to the warehouse to help Stef paint her bedroom. The warehouse is a huge, bohemian space in Hackney with twelve residents. The landlord is in the music industry; bought the place as a shell and built all the rooms inside. Downstairs is the basement, bike store and recording studio; upstairs is a huge communal open-plan lounge and kitchen space, bordered with mismatched sofas and one wall lined with a long, heavy wooden banquet table. The windows stretch up to the ceiling, eclectic bits of furniture skirt the edges of the room (including leather-upholstered folding chairs of the kind one might expect to find in an early 20th century bus or cinema, a bunch of old-school lockers, odd little chests of drawers and a couple of bookcases) and there are half-finished canvasses propped up all around the walls. The roof is slanted and a high ceiling is measured by wooden beams stretching through the middle of the space.

The bedrooms are tesselated into corners, no floor or ceiling the same height as another. The walls and floors are constructed out of wood and chipboard; metal beams and staircases lend an industrial, futuristic feel. Some of the rooms are enormous, stretching from front to back of the warehouse. There is a communal bathroom downstairs, dark-tiled with a huge tropical plant with rubbery dark green leaves taking up the whole of one corner. The bath is free-standing on four ornate feet; at the first warehouse party I came to it was candlelit and strewn with rosepetals. There's a tiny cabin shower-room upstairs with a perpetually damp floor, and Stef's room is next to this. She travels so much that she needs somewhere with low enough rent that she can afford to keep the room while she's out of the country. Her room is a bed-width space tall enough to stand in, with awkward metal rungs leading up the wall beside the window to a cabin bed built into the very rafters of the building. Bed above, bed-sized space underneath. That's it. There's no furniture except a low shelf/desk space under the window, made out of chipboard resting on car tyres. The walls are covered in paint, mannequins draped with chunky African jewellry, and clothes are bundled everywhere.

She shows me some of her artwork - postcard prints of minutely detailled, decorative art. Figurative studies in the style of henna tattoos, every inch of paper covered with tiny, beautiful decorative designs that shape the contours of body and background. Some are layered with translucent paper bearing subtly different designs, the visible layers combining to create three-dimensional structure. She works in pen and ink, calligraphy ink, acrylic and glass paint. The walls downstairs in her cabin are already sprawling with paint in similar designs. Birds and tiny figures are glimpsed among the endless floriate swirls and spirals. The resulting effect is reminiscent of illustrated manuscripts. She wants to paint the tiny, angular walls above the upstairs bed.

Getting up to the bed is awkward - it takes a few tries to get the hang of it. The rungs are metal loops about 3 inches across and 2 inches deep, screwed to the wall in two vertical rows to create a sparse diagonal ladder. You have to put one hand on the wooden beam at the foot of the bed and the other on the windowsill to heave yourself up, then grope with a foot to find the rung screwed beneath the window and hoist yourself backwards until your bum finds the bed. Going to the loo in the middle of the night is not a straightforward mission. It poses no obstacle to Stef, compact ninja girl who runs up the ladder like a monkey and sits effortlessly in the low alcove without fear of banging her head.

The window is high, curtained with hippy throws and sarongs which you pull on to open or close it. Sunlight streams through it onto the rumpled bedclothes nestling among the low wooden beams. You have to be careful sitting up in bed; there's an ancient beam carving a horizontal straight across the middle of the bed about two feet above it. The window looks out onto the railway line and the sound of trains is a soothing constant. If you're brave enough to jump the gap from bed to windowsill you can climb out onto the roof. You can lean against the steep slant of the tiles, feet resting in the gutter beneath a low wall, to smoke and watch the city. We leave our wine bottles out there to chill, to save going up and down to the kitchen when we want a refill.

We've brought back two bottles of wine and a big bag of pistachios, and we roll ourselves generous joints. One of us goes up first, arranges the bedclothes and the other passes up water jars, brushes, palettes, paints. Music plays on her laptop and we tuck ourselves under the low slanted ceiling, twisting and contorting to reach the bits of wall we want. Every so often we swap places. We talk for hours, painting on autopilot, giggling and swigging wine. She tells me funny stories about bringing lovers up here, how to work around (and with) the limited space. When it gets dark the bed area is lit with a round, ambient dimmer light mounted into the wall. We paint around it. Towards the end of the second bottle of wine we spill a jar of paint water all over the bed, and have to strip all the sheets to put a towel down and replace the bedding. Stef shrugs - it's happened before.

Towards three am we're pissed and giggling, the paints abandoned, lying on our backs and looking up at our handiwork. We start to vandalise it with ballpoint pens, annotating it like a map with in-jokey graffiti that makes me grin every time I've seen it since. We fall asleep to the regular, comforting industrial sounds of the trains passing. When we wake sunlight is splashing through the window into the beamed alcove of the bed, lighting up our handiwork. I half-expected it to be nonsensical, incoherent, but there's a strange rhythm and beauty to it. Around the awkward space of the low slanted walls and ceiling we've created a circle of life, a micro-universe, teeming with activity and colour. It's silly and lovely and Stef is delighted with it. Her alcove is transformed into a tiny sanctuary filled with secrets. It suits her.

Comments

[mr_magicfingers]

Looks stunning and suits her (and you) really well.

[libellum.livejournal.com]

Thankyou :) She has to repaint before she moves out, and so would I, but somehow painting the walls of my room is never something I've done. I don't think I'll start in the Den - but when I get my own place? Maybe. Exciting thought :)

[thene]

I want to live there.

[libellum.livejournal.com]

In the warehouse, or in Stef's room? If the former, god, I know. I'm jealous :) I'm lying in wait to see if a room becomes free ... although I've put Chris forward for the next one that might be vacated, as it's very near his workplace and I want to live alone next anyway.

If the latter: it's a nice idea in theory, but I have way too much stuff and I <3 my kingsize bed.

[the-lady-lily.livejournal.com]

I see what you mean about a strange space to work in - but what a result! It's beautiful :)

[libellum.livejournal.com]

It was a really cool project! It makes me want to build ridiculous sets out of chipboard and cover them in paint. In fact I had an awesome idea for an installation that was a series of rooms and corridors, mismatched and rambling, covered in paint, which the viewer could get lost in. With crawlspaces and secret trapdoors and dead ends. And little treasure chests full of love-letters and secrets, telling stories about memory which the viewer pieces together themselves, depending on the route they take through the maze and the experiences they bring with them. There'd be a central room which would be reminiscent of the temple at Burning Man, a shrine of painted walls and notes which the viewer was welcome to add to.

It's the sort of thing we'd need a) a massive budget and b) a huge installation space to put together, but it's also the sort of thing that I might be able to write up a convincing proposal for and send off to art council type people to see if funding was forthcoming. In fact it would make a great joint project for an artist residency, if I can find one that's London-based and non-residential. Going up in a tower in a Cornish village for a month is a compelling idea, but not terribly practical in reality :)

[the-lady-lily.livejournal.com]

That sounds exceptionally groovy - and exactly like something the Arts council would fund, if you could find some way to make it edumacational... Victorian romance novel inspired, maybe?