When I began to dream up Bedding Out, I kept bumping into John and Yoko and Tracey and began to wonder how many other have made art based on the bed. Quite a few, it turns out, though not many actually inhabit their beds or convey a sense of their bed as occupied.

This week, though, actor Tilda Swinton has hit the headlines, sleeping in a glass box in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, in a reprise of her 1995 performance The Maybe. You only have to read the comments sections in the press to know that this is the marmite of the art world, and whilst I can’t abide marmite, I find something deeply tender in this sleeping form made public, this voluntary act of vulnerability. Asleep in the gallery for several six-and-a-half-hour stints*  over the year, the audience can linger as long as they choose in the privilege of the gaze.”

Read on….http://www.disabilityartsonline.org.uk/?location_id=2053&item=1760

“I recently bought a new bed. I spent days browsing the internet for deals. Thing is the bed had to be right. I wanted modern, sleek, cheap, a headboard that wasn’t padded and pink like my nan’s and a mattress which would guarantee blissful slumber, and all for around three hundred quid.

It was not easy, let me tell you. I could have a metal bed frame with iron headboard, not really built for resting my reading back on. Or I could have an ottoman storage bed, which I could hide my excess junk, never to be seen again because if I wanted to get to it I’d be dismantling the bed, and I’m far too lazy for that!

My dream of throwing myself onto an immaculately made bed, covered in golden silk sheets and sinking into a marshmallow mattress enveloped in luscious quilted throws, whilst surrounded by delightful boudoir cushions was, all the while looking like I had just stepped out of a Vogue fashion shoot … was exactly that, a dream. Marshmallow mattress!! I’m far too old for that. Silk sheets? Expensive and slippery! And as for the Vogue me, well that’s serious fantasy!

So began the is it too hard or too soft mattress malarkey. I was getting away from a memory foam thing which seemed to forget I slept there and ensured every part of me ached next morning. There were extra firm, firm, medium firm, sprung, pocket, air pocket, spring, wring, cling… it was all very confusing. What was clear was I needed practical comfort, but it couldn’t have flowers.. or be blue, most certainly not blue, when I was made homeless and moving out I remember my blue mattress being heaved onto the removal truck and the memory doesn’t fit well with comfort  I associate with ‘my bed’.

So your reading this and thinking something like ‘flipping eck it was just a cheap bed, how hard can that be?’ (‘hard’, do you see what did there?) Yet it was, it took me about ten days to decide, I got the platform from one place, the mattress from another. I wanted the best nest I could get for my money, but knowing that it has to last, needs to do the job because I can’t afford it not to.

Whilst I don’t have a ‘bed life’ my life is made manageable by having a place where I can rest well.

I guess writing this little missive has served to make me aware that there must be a massive emphasis of getting your bed right if it’s somewhere you spend a lot of your days, in both comfort and discomfort.

Can we talk about your beds? See your bed? Hear your bed buying dramas….?”

It really is all about #beddingout

I made my bed… I lie in it

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