Imagine educational spaces as a kind of labyrinth, palimpsests and subverted histories turned to a space of exploration and wonder, where those who journey in this space create and find the unexpected around every corner.
Sarah-Jane Crowson
Doctoral Student
Imagine a labyrinth. Imagine yourself a traveller, deep, deep underground, passages worn from the rock over time, from water perhaps, that fluid kind of knowledge that eats away at soft rock but leaves granite - the oldest, hardest stones - behind.
The passages twist and turn, some inviting, with the glimpse of warm lights, some dark and cold and full of stones or bones that might be re-imagined as treasure. Sometimes you glimpse locked boxes glimmering in the walls of the labyrinth, and sometimes you find keys to open them, to find...what? A perfect egg shaped chalk, a papery wonder, a burst of music, or a sudden gust of air that temporarily extinguishes a candle - leaves you feeling your way - tentative - along stone walls to inch your way forwards.
This is a land of strange artefacts; small cubes of letters, photographs pinned up and drying, a sideboard, full of tiny shelves and velvet-lined drawers that you can store your luggage in or in which you find letters, books, secret treasures, voices whispering in the darkness.
Sometimes the sense, or type, of the labyrinth changes. You might be walking downwards, water lapping beside you as if in caves under the sea, then suddenly the path veers upwards, turf springs underfoot, and the labyrinth is a forest - the trees towering over you like fan vaulting.
A cathedral, a courtroom, a host of giant redwoods. In this labyrinth you meet fellow travellers, each carrying artefacts; sometimes a book, sometimes a tiny statue, a spray-can, a piece of twisted metal; objects are unlocked ideas. You may travel with them for part of the way, or loop back to rejoin them after a pause. Whichever part of the labyrinth you are travelling through you will still find them, for they are travellers/dreamers like yourself, wandering and finding wonders in these secret dwelling places.
Space is your companion on this journey - the labyrinth offers you a place to populate, to put down your objects, to break things and mend them with liquid gold. Your companions shape-shift; a giant wooden wardrobe, a comfortable armchair. They travel with you, secretive, winged, a room which follows you, ready for when you need it to appear. You are bound to them like a golden thread, opening yourself to them and enclosing yourself in them; dwelling places for the creatures of the labyrinth.
When morning comes, and you see blue sky and green hills veering out from the walls of the labyrinth, you are almost sorry that your long journey is over. You leave the grandeur and homeliness of the labyrinth and choose a pathway to follow through open spaces of hills, parcelling up your objects, slipping keys onto chains, leaving trails behind, taking the ghost of your space with you in your careful pocket.
You can find more information at Sarah-Jane's website.
