Back in December, the University of Wolverhampton and Spaceplay announced a competition to win one of Spaceplay’s sold-out micro-sculptures of the School of Art, known affectionately—I think— as the Milk Crate. Entrants were invited to share their memories and stories of the school. This was pretty much my daily destination between September 1990 and July 1993 while I was a student there and the location of many fond experiences and memories. Below is my winning entry! And below that, an unboxing of the prize…

What's your strongest memory of the School of Art?

I studied Fine Art (Sculpture) there between 1990 and 1993. I loved the course and would often go in to my studio space over the weekend to work, though most students did not take this option. One wintery evening in 1992, I was working alone in the ‘sculpture pit’ on floor 6, sewing together scraps of roofing lead with wire to create strange, organic 3-D forms (I still have this rather ugly sculpture). Progress was slow and precise and it was easy to zone out while working. I lost track of time, estimating it to be late afternoon but knew that the security officer would appear at 4pm to announce that the building was closing. By the time it grew dark enough for me to put the lights on in the studio, I realised it must have surely gone 4pm. I took the lift down to the ground floor and sure enough the building was unstaffed and I was locked in. My immediate response was to go back to work on my lead sculpture, glad to have some extra time. By nightfall proper, the heating had turned off and it was getting cold. I was also getting hungry. I found some tinned goods on the Illustration floor, beautifully rebranded with a student’s handmade label designs featuring cut out letters (this was before digital design methods were widely adopted). Survival instinct engaged, I hacked these open with a screwdriver and heated up some curried beans (with raisins) on a portable hotplate that I had in my studio. I went back to work, hotplate serving as a radiator to the enormous space. By late evening, I was freezing and hungry again and went to look for more food. A second sweep of the floors turned up only cinnamon ‘Winter Warmer’ Tic Tacs and a carton of Ribena. I felt the urgent need to leave and resolved to escape. On the side of the School of Art facing the Molineux Stadium, scaffolding had been erected for the full height of the building. I knew my window would slide open as the screw keeping it shut was missing (opening the windows since some tie after 1971 was strictly forbidden). Dare I risk climbing down the scaffold? Yes—the call of hot food and a soft, warm bed was too great. I grabbed my housekeys and stepped out onto the narrow ledge, closed the window behind me and began my descent of the scaffold lattice. I seem to remember there being wooden platforms and ladders connecting the levels, but that these had been chained closed to stop people using them to get in. By focusing on each successive hand- and foot-hold, I could avoid thinking about the sheer drop or being seen. My memory of the descent is of how cold it was rather than how scary. Minutes later, I landed safely on the snowy ground and minutes later was walking home, past The Feathers where I had enjoyed many after-hours lock-ins, past the football stadium and into Whitmore Reans, relishing the rare feeling of freedom and gratitude to be on solid ground. I vowed never to share the story with anyone for thirty years...

If you studied Illustration at Wolverhampton in the early 90s and came in one Monday to find your illustration project ruined, well we need to talk!

The boxed concrete sculpture made by Spaceplay is a beautiful object and I’m thrilled to own it, not least because their creations tend to sell out very quickly. As much time and thought has gone into the packaging as making the sculpture itself. It is housed in an almost Mecca-like mysterious black cube with no external clues to the contents or who made it. Once inside, a small card shows a detail of the building, including the octagonal windows like the one I escaped from (these are less clear on the small scale of the sculpture itself, so it is nice to have this extra detail in another medium). The block itself is protected by several layers of grey foam. A U of W T shirt and tote bag accompanied the box when it arrived last week, with Spaceplay’s modernist restyling of their logo. Look our for Spaceplay’s Brutal Easter Egg Hunt over the Easter weekend 8 -10 April 2023.

I dug out some photos of the Art School and my sculptures from this time at the request of the U of W and share some here. The red rubber objects are dog toys twisted into nine different shapes. My friend Phil Beech owned the original—or maybe his dog ‘Orph’ owned it— and while playing with it, I realised it naturally would hold its shape in a variety of forms. I set about trying to find them all by outsourcing the work to likely ‘noodlers’. Eight came back over a few days and then a ninth (shown in the 1 o’clock position) was discovered by Kath Gardner some weeks later—an impossible eureka moment for those ‘in the loop’. Print tutor Pete Olly remarked that it was the most ‘complete’ sculpture he had ever seen.

The intense pencil drawing was chewed while rolled up by the same dog; Phil was horrified and thought I would go nuts but I actually liked the results…good dog! The black objects were plastic and rubber components that I found on urban walks, presumably things that fell of vehicles as these discoveries tended to be roadside finds. I collected dozens the only rule for picking them up was not to know what they were. I arranged 154 of them as if they were part of a larger taxonomy, each element similar to its neighbour. After graduating, I kept them in a cardboard box which I threw out in 1994, believing them to be a waste of space. That decision is one of my few regrets in life! Looking back, I think I was trying to shed a particular outlook that I felt would not be helpful in the world of work; shortly after this I realised my earlier mindset was still applicable to many aspects of work and my Art School days still inform the work I do today. Since 1994, I have been restoring the sculpture with replacement roadside finds and by now have a similar number to begin arranging them according to that same invisible taxonomy. The original work took three years to collect and the replacement nearly 30, which says something either about the amount of urban walks I undertook back then, or perhaps the quality of the adhesion of the rubber components to the vehicles.

The last photo is of Illustration student Kulbir Sohal, pictured outside the art block in Winter 1991/2 and definitely not the student whose work I wrecked during my fight to stay alive. The cosmic jacket she is wearing was actually mine! What can I say, it was the 90s…