Home seen through a stereoscope.

In the Herbert there’s a Victorian Stereoscope. You look through the eye piece at two almost identical pictures and the lens moves them together so that you see the scene in three d.

For anyone who either grows up in a migrant community or migrates, Home is always an odd word. We could get the bus home from the library and my father would tell me stories about home which were about a totally different place.

So the slide labeled “home” is not two identical scenes that can be transposed over each other to give an illusion of depth, but two completely different pictures linked by the accidents of biography. The place I came from, personalized with my own life stories, by the fact that experiences happen somewhere and memories of that place are coloured by the memory of the experience. Coventry my not be the most beautiful city on the planet but a lot of good things happened there. "Home" where I grew up, forever “back” in past tense.

And home. Where I live now.

When I look through the eye piece at the slide labeled Home, instead of one three d picture, I see a strange imposition of one scene over the other, so neither can be seen entirely clearly. I used to think this was a bad thing.

Now I think it's an interesting perspective.

(The picture of the stereo scope I found at: http://cnx.org/content/m13784/latest/

The Launch

24 hours in a droning tin can...now there's a challenge, find something poetic in international air flights.

We launched Lady G in the Herbert Art Gallery. In a space between the new Godiva gallery and George Eliot's piano. Mat Merrit was kind enough to turn up and read some poems to get the thing rolling. Then half an hour of Lady g, stories, some questions and it was all done.

The refurbished Herbert is a beautiful building. Given the amount of ugly post war buildings in Coventry there's a certain amount of suprise in that statement. More of that later.

Before the reading Chris and I walked down to see the Old Cathedral. It's illuminated at night and the way its broken walls and spires shape the darkness around it, adding shade and colour to a cloudless night sky was worth freezing for.