We are pleased to welcome our guest blogger, Edinburgh based artist and writer, Catherine Marshall.

Catherine’s work explores the boundary between the banal and the absurd through subjecting the rhythms, the routines and the structures of everyday life to an intense and detailed scrutiny. She is interested in different articulations of structure and form, both in relation to the built environment, as well as to visual and written language.

Here she recounts how a spontaneous game of table tennis with her son, in a closed-off space at Summerhall in Edinburgh turned into an impromptu performance, which was subsequently re-lived on a repeat visit a few weeks later.

For more on her work, please visit: http://compartmentsee.blogspot.co.uk/

In a dusty room, in the basement corridor of Summerhall in Edinburgh, my son and I are playing a game of table tennis. Ten minutes before, I had been cajoling him to come to the centre at all, as he didn't want to see 'art you like' which, he said, was 'boring'. But here we are now engrossed in a game, not even sure if we were supposed to be using this room at all.

By all accounts, it was a storage space: empty plinths, stacked chairs covered with dust, a glass of red wine abandoned on the floor. We had paused and peered into the darkness of the room, seen the table tennis table and cheekily flicked on the switch, bathing the room in fluorescent light. Accompanied by Donna Summer on an infernal loop blasting from a film installation next door, our performance had begun. Members of the public walked past, peered in for an instant, then moved on. All that we lacked was a title for our show.

Nothing happened much in our performance, my son's school uniform got covered in dust as he wriggled under the chairs to retrieve a ping-pong ball. No, nothing really happened, just a victory on both sides and a lot of fun. No lasting impressions from our under-the-radar performance then, just a permanent synesthetic association between table tennis and Donna Summer for the performers themselves.

After this discovery, it was not hard anymore to persuade my son to come to the arts centre.

When we returned at a later date for a rematch, we found the room had been cleared. But just beyond the corridor in an exhibition space there was, luckily for us, a new table tennis table. This time it was not near collapse like the other one, but brand new and covered with an intriguing laminated design. Three brand new bats sat in their holder and there was a bowl full of new ping-pong balls.

This table tennis table, however, formed the basis of a sound piece, and it had a title, Noisy Table, a collaboration between artist Will Nash and the Build Brighton Hack Space. When the ball hits the table the vibrations creates sounds that are broadcast back into the game. In one of its soundscapes, the ball's touch on the table filled the room with words spoken by Ivor Cutler: 'Creamy Pumpkins', 'Kiss', 'How do I get out of here?' My younger son aged 4, not yet old enough to play, but able to operate the buttons switching soundscapes, was heaped over the corner of the table in fits of giggles, connecting as children naturally do, with the absurd.

The artist has said of the piece: 'People can feel intimidated when they are asked to join in by an artist but they don't even think about that with table tennis. They just pick up the bat and start playing'.

When it was first exhibited, the ping-pong table simply exhibited the sound of the ping-pong hitting the table, a nice idea in itself. Now it has apparently endless possibilities as it can work with open patch software for customisation.

May I suggest for its next incarnation, a soundscape of top volume disco hits of Donna Summer, filtered through a dusty room and an eight-year old boy shouting, 'best out of 10, no 11, no 12!' 'Just one more game!' and 'Stop taking pictures Mum, just play!'

The room at the top of the Dickens Museum is a nursery, and has been dressed as such, with a children’s bed, some drawings, a display of Victorian toys and games, some freshly laundered linen draped over a wooden washstand. It would have been the room for Dickens’ own children – his eldest son Charles as well as Mary and Kate, both of whom were born in the house. It’s a lovely sweet room, quiet and calm, filled with a sense of being separated from the bustle of the rest of the house.

And then there are the prison bars – an original iron grille rescued from the old Marshalsea Debtors Prison in Borough, where, in 1824, Dickens’ father and most of his siblings were incarcerated for debt. A text panel describes how, being only 12 at the time, the young Dickens was put into lodgings nearby and ordered to work in a boot-blacking factory in Waterloo.

Being situated in the nursery, the installation of the grilles recalls the effect that his father’s imprisonment had on the young Dickens, describing how the episode would haunt him for the rest of his life, and how he would return to it, exploring it in his writing continuously.

Positioning the grilles not in his own bedroom, but in his children’s, invites the visitor to think about psychological legacy and how that very painful episode might have played itself out, perhaps more symbolically, in the emotional lives of children. The room does not tell us details about Charles, Mary, and Kate. Instead, we come face to face with the structure of family history common to us all. In this many layered house, we consider what kinds of emotional weights, prison grilles or otherwise, reside in the upstairs nurseries where we left our own play things years ago.

My step dad is quite weird for he calls strangers things like ‘buddy’ and ‘my friend’.

One of the fantastic contributions to our Observations activity - the activity we designed for the newly opened Anna Freud Room in the Freud Museum in London.

Anna Freud devoted her life to the emotional wellbeing of children. Her work was based on making detailed written observations of the children in her care. The activity White Wall Yellow Door designed is based upon this methodology, but in a reversal of the usual model where the adult observes the child, children are invited to observe the adults, and to record their observations on specially produced Observation Cards, which are left in a card index box in the museum.

The responses have been brilliant. Here, the child queries a social convention that has become such a normalized part of everyday speech as to be almost invisible.

It’s through this kind of questioning that we have the chance to get a glimpse of the familiar anew.