went “wee, wee, wee” all the way home.
If you missed the instagram-based blow-for-blow account of my indignation at receiving a last-minute 30% rent increase on my studio at High Bridge Works, I’ve moved out.
Moved home, actually.
The shit-heel at Knight Frank who won the contract to manage Newcastle City Council's property was a walking Bingo card of ‘Nightmare Landlord Traits’ and I had decided to leave the building that had for 12 years been the thing I loved most about living in Newcastle. Sometimes the juice just isn’t worth the squeeze.
In December Ideal Brown and I moved into a house with loft space, which we gutted and made lovely. We had what felt like a minute to contemplate what we’d do with “all this extra house” and the answer was “fill it to the brim with Candice’s shit, which now spans three disciplines”.
On that note: if practised in the home a discipline feels an awful lot like a hobby.
The comedy of errors that led up to realising that I had 12 years’ worth of detritus to shift and some of it too big and wide to make the turn on the loft staircase included: moving an entire house across a back lane without professional help on December 22nd and saying “I’m never moving again” just two months earlier.
Last week it was so hot (and right now, comparatively clean) that foam rolling is becoming my prime area of focus. I love work but lying on the floor during the workday is really underscoring that hog-like feeling. The electric light at night isn’t ideal for making up those lost hours, so I’m still finding my bearings - and growing tomatoes up here while I do it. It’s 28 degrees.
It feels new and fun and airy and if you go for a surf at midday, you can head straight back to work and crack on in a wet swimsuit or with your tits just out. It is twenty-eight degrees.
I’m on a bunch of studio waiting lists at the moment but I’m going to wait and see if Seasonal Affective Disorder is even a thing if you’ve got velux windows and a cat meowing his sick breath in your face all day. I hope not.
The good news is that I have a deadline to adhere to in the form of another group show with Vertical Gallery later this year in Chicago. Two small paintings will be on their way soon.
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