8.30 am. Into the School to deliver the Chapels in Wales lecture. 10.00 am. Into the small gallery to begin the hang. Only when all the works and equipment are in the room can an order be imposed upon the disparate elements:

Initially, one is plagued by uncertainties: Are there too few or too many works to fit the space?; Can the size differentials between the works be reconciled?; and, Will the whole cohere? In every case, the answers can only be found as one acts intelligently. After all, it’s the artist who makes them all fit together in their due proportion and in unity. Thereafter, one has to determine the sub-groups of the work — which artefacts either form sets or naturally gravitate to one another. Then, one must resolve each wall in turn and, after that, all four walls of the gallery together. Oddly, if this was someone else’s work, then I could do the job far more quickly and confidently. However, as the maker, I’m too close to the work and the work is too new to me. I cannot see the brush marks for the paint, as it were.

I laid out the sound equipment early on in the day in order to assess whether power and audio cables were sufficiently long to extend from the speakers to the mixer. (I hadn’t taken into consideration the slight recess in the window alcoves.) That’s one thing I’d missed. But there’s a remedy. The speakers sit comfortably on their grey plinths in the gallery space. Visually, one has to treat them as a sculptural objects. And, as such, the placing of the works on the gallery walls have to take account of, and respond to, them. I’ve experienced too many sound-art installations where the visual presence of the equipment appears to have been either was ill-considered or ignored. Such things are not invisible to one’s audience.

By the close of the afternoon, most of the large and difficult pieces were on the walls. (The most testing and complex is ‘The Floating Bible’. But that’s for the floor and Friday.) My earlier decisions regarding the grouping of the works were confirmed. They sit together without a struggle.

6.30 pm A busy evening and late night ahead. I worked further on the phantom painting and then returned to printing out sheets for ‘The Floating Bible’. What if my photocopier gave out? I’ve no plan B. And, I wouldn’t put anybody’s else’s machine through what I ask of my own. Both the copier and the paper have exceeded their design parameters significantly:

By 9.00 pm, the phantom painting was finished (and was every inch what I saw in my mind’s eye), and the recto prints of ‘The Floating Bible’ were complete too. 10.30 pm. Back to the QR coding and web-based presentations of artwork explanations.