This afternoon I was able to go over to Oldham and spend some time in the gallery taking in David Ball exhibition “A to Z: The First Seven Years”.

On Saturday 2nd February I’ll be running a poetry workshop in this space using David’s exhibition and ongoing project for inspiration so today was all about finding some of that inspiration in preparation.

I had a good look at lots of the pictures and spent quite some time soaking in the atmosphere and even watching the reactions of those visiting the exhibition.Things that occurred to me included:

• The scale of the exhibits surprised me
• The scale of the task for the artist is hard to comprehend
• The word “scale” is a good few years further through the alphabet
• What if the dictionary were indexed by years and months rather than pages?
• I wonder if he can really complete it
• What happens when he reaches the word “unfinished”?
• I speak at around 100 words a minute so it would take me almost 20 minutes just to read a list of the words represented on the walls – only 20 minutes to list 7 years of work….
• I wonder if, having moved from drawings and illustrations to photos, the artist will embrace other ways of visualising as the project develops
• I wonder if I could talk to the artist about this….

Some of the pictures are what we might expect but others are really personal, unusual and clever interpretations of the word, I loved the image for asylum shown here:

I’m looking forward to the workshop even more having completed today’s visit.