My Hay Installation: Part 1 - an Introduction

Over the last few days I have been preparing my installation for the Hay Literary Festival. Since I have an non-ticketed slot, where people can just drop in, I thought I'd design what I'd do with this in mind.

A talk or an interview would be inappropriate, I decided; because people really need to be in at the beginning for that, and stay until the end. What I needed was something more casual, where it wouldn't matter what time they came. They could listen to a short section and then come and go as they wished.

In Chester Writers last meeting a friend of mine wrote a circular poem - it didn't matter where you started reading - and I've been thinking ever since why this worked so well. I've decided that it was probably because it was an interesting and elegant list. So I decided to attempt to do something like that and call it an installation - as I've seen in art exhibitions.

So my installation for Hay is going to consist of a series of short films - just a minute long - leading to a single frame which I use as a background to my reading. The reading will also be short - about 5 minutes in length - and then there will be another film. There will be seven of these sequences - film then reading - altogether. About 45 minutes altogether. Although the whole thing tells a story it won't be necessary to see the whole thing to make sense of a particular section. Each will stand alone. I suppose another way of putting all this is to say it is modular.