The water changed the art graf from a firm, waxy mark to a soft, black wash with delicate frayed edges and the Woolf carbon pencil became gorgeously black when used over the damp surface – exciting discoveries! They were trying to explain the long unwieldy detours to people who wanted to cross the road, except they didn’t know the shape of the city so had to be helped by other people who had wanted to cross the road, but like us, been brought to a standstill. It is true that they seem to be more constant these days, a permanence in their windows, continually painting and working. Suddenly my life when I was their age is in full ruck and flow, with night streets and lights and traffic smells alive and moving through me — the Archway road, Kentish Town, all the people and all the walking, here to here to here.

The curtains that hung in this room, and that were hanging here twenty years ago, when I moved in, were so precisely the colour and texture of those in the painting by Ensor that I couldn’t believe that it was not also of my room, although in fact the painted room was in Ostende, and there are two windows in it, with a mirror between, whereas in my room, and in my childhood room, there is only one — it must be the light that does it.Such lines of shoes are the first things that greet you as you cross the threshold into the private space of a house. When I taped them to the wall in the spring, they seemed somehow to fit the awful circumstances in which they were now situated. They had found a source, almost on the grounds of a nuclear power station, looking over to the islands of Arran and little Cumbrae. There is a Russian word that surfaces when I am writing to a friend in Moscow: Безвременье, Bezvremenye. I live in a city far from where I grew up, and miss the city I grew up in, although I am not sure that the city I want to go back to is actually there where I left it.

I looked back at the power station, and thought of the sign on the road warning people not to interfere with the plants on the other side of the fence. Thank you for your wonderful comments about my walking drawing resource and it’s lovely that you’re inspired to try the process out. The sun slices into the space from one of the streets: six straight lines that enter, or lead away from the circle like rays on a drawing of a sun, on this day of almost equinox.

And so we embraced and hummed and danced our farewell hugs together as though we were the waltzing figures in the snow in the Soviet film. Two years of enforced relative stasis by pandemic and I am still drawing breath, relieved at not having to spring into step at my own or other’s demand.

Especially when leaving on a journey, looking back into my room, the waiting shelves of books, as I picked up my bag to leave it. Her work is concerned with individual and collective narratives of place and displacement, the repetition and variation of daily experience and the ways that this can be articulated in images and in words. The heat does not draw you in but makes you rather retreat to the shadows and pull down the blinds, as if in Rome or Athens. Prints of one of these bandstand drawings are being sold in the café on the street below, where his father’s bakery once stood, to fund a campaign to save the circus from being dug up and “re-landscaped” by the local council.We believe everyone has the right to be creative and by working together and sharing ideas we can enable everyone to reach their creative potential. Yet it seems that only a complete surrender to the experience of these specific surfaces permits the displacement into other cities and other spaces that we crave.

She has exhibited in joint and group shows at the Centre for Recent Drawing (C4RD), Artspace Gallery and the Royal Academy in London and in Glasgow Project Room, Transmission and Mansfield Gallery, Glasgow; she has also shown work in Russia and in France: at the Echomusée, Paris and at the Universities of Lyons and Cergy-Pontoise in collaboration with the Banlieue Network. I wondered if this was intentional, to leave the light on, or if the forensic team were just too exhausted and forgot to turn it off. I started making these small drawings of shelters, and trees, last November, as the trees shed their yellow. Its water soluble nature encouraged me to take more risks with the drawings and I combined it with a carbon pencil to achieve a variety of line and tone; occasionally I would add in a water soluble coloured pencil.I’m looking in, watching myself travelling through the pictured possible places, and the hold of the rooms opposite is waning. We had laboured and given birth in the hospitals, and kept watch over people close to us on the wards: friends, partners and children, through times of extremity, fear and danger. To think of this multiplied endlessly — all the rooms, all the sad belongings — shoes, clothes, pictures, chairs and tables, scattered and crumbled.