26 Fruits

Come May, I’ll be at the Story Museum in Oxford. The Story Museum is – as you might expect from the name – a magical place. Once it was the main GPO building, a sorting office and a telephone exchange, the industrial hub of an ancient city’s communication system. Now it’s a dilapidated labyrinth with a spider’s web in every corner of fifty rooms, and the traces of stories in every space.

The dilapidation is not by design. The building itself was a generous gift. Now the Story Museum is busily raising the money to restore, refurbish, renovate, re-everything. The architects and the plans are in place, and in a couple of years a transformation will become visible. The Story Museum will then properly open its doors to fire new generations with the love of stories and storytelling. That’s for the future. This Dark Angels project is for now.

We established links with the Museum during last year’s Dark Angels master class in Merton College, Oxford. The current situation – dilapidated building with many empty rooms, the early phase of fundraising – seemed an opportunity and an invitation rather than a problem. We thought we could help and have some fun while doing so. So Stuart, Jamie and I suggested a special project to the Museum’s wonderful co-directors Kim and Tish. Our proposal was to pair each of our writers from the two Dark Angels master classes (some twenty writers) with a randomly chosen room in the building. Then to invite the writers to pair up with visual artists of their choice to create installations in each of those rooms. The result will be an exhibition called Other Worlds that will open to the public in May.

We’ve now got all the proposals in and the teams are working towards the May Day deadline. Some special guests – Michael Rosen, for example – loved the idea and wanted to join in. These are just some of the planned installations: The Invisible Woman, The Time-Traveller’s Bureau, The Gallery of Lost Stories, The Word Storm, The Room of White Trees, The National Audio Sneeze Analysis Laboratory. We’ll be filling rooms with stories. The rooms were once canteens, corridors between offices, call centres: now we’re making room for stories. In May these rooms will invite you to discover new stories, to reconnect with that tradition of Oxford storytelling that has created Other Worlds from the imaginations of Lewis Carroll, CS Lewis, Tolkien and Philip Pullman.

My own contribution is called The Story Angels.  I’m working with Anita Klein again, always a joy. We were assigned the entranceway so our installation has to greet visitors and set the scene for what follows as you walk around the building. There will be a surprise in every room; good stories are full of surprises. So, in that spirit, I’ll say no more for now, keeping more secrets under wraps. But I will return to this subject as the exhibition develops in the coming months.

In the meantime there are stories to write, artworks to prepare, funders to find.

http://www.storymuseum.org.uk/the-story-museum/otherworlds

Consider yourself invited.