In 2002 when I was studying for my BA at Dun Laoghaire in Ireland we took a field trip to Liverpool to visit the Biennial. There was much to see at the Biennial but the work that made the greatest impression on me was Christine Hill’s Volksboutique Accounting Archive which was installed in the Pleasant Street School.

When I first walked through the doors of the building I passed right by the Volksboutique Accounting Archive to reach the alluring displays of Todd James, Barry McGee and Stephen Powers exhibited in the school yard beyond. These works were bold and brightly coloured, and their collective force in the small, derelict primary school playground was visually arresting in a very immediate way. However once I had absorbed the technicolour angst and humour of these works I went back inside the building and began to reappraise the Volksboutique Accounting Archive. I looked again at the gold-lettered glass window and the neat wooden desks inside. I entered and began to read the encouraging words on the hand-lettered posters that said things like ‘redefine creative accounting,’ and then I found a cream and brown form, and a fine yellow pencil with V O L K S B O U T I Q U E printed along its length, and realised that I was being invited to submit my account to the archive.

I sat down at a table and took up my pencil with a flourish. I excitedly crammed a clumsy account of my life onto the form and took my submission up to the desk, where Christine Hill’s assistant carefully took it from me in exchange for a hand-stamped receipt. I still have that receipt. In fact it is my favourite piece of Art that I own. It says: Thank you for your contribution to the Volksboutique Accounting Archive. We appreciate your participation and we value your account and it represents to me the moment in my life when I realised that making Art is about making Experiences.

I went on to write a lot about Christine Hill’s work and to obsess quite a lot about the subversiveness of the work, its seamless integration of economic realities and imaginative realms and its brilliant, participatory aspects. I thought about the other accounts I had read from the archive and how reading them provided insights into Liverpudlian life which would have been otherwise impossible to perceive as a visitor to a strange town.

But most of all, I became fascinated in Art practises that work with ideas of the Everyday and with the idea that we use Art to understand our actual lives, rather than to escape them.

My favourite poster from Christine Hill’s Home Office show in the Ronald Feldman Gallery.

In 2003, Christine Hill had a show opening in the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York City. I had just completed a mural commission in order to raise some cash for my final year of studies and I spent the whole lot on a flight to go and see this show. I arrived in the city jetlagged and disorientated, dropped my bags off in the hostel where I was staying, and wandered around until far later than I should have done, in the strange time-zone of someone who is 5 hours ahead of where they are and totally over-excited to be in the Big Apple.

The next morning I headed over to the Ronald Feldman Gallery more tired than I ever remember feeling and sick with nerves. Christine and I spoke for five and a half hours about Home Office and about the ideas in the show. Bespoke trunks were positioned around the gallery, each one containing the different items relating to a particular set of tasks that must be performed in the course of artmaking. We looked at these, talked about the importance of inventorying in art practises that deal with the everyday, and discussed the irrational and idiosyncratic economics of Art.

I left NYC the next day and flew back to Ireland and the daunting prospect of writing up my thesis. It took me quite some time to transcribe all 21,000 words of our conversation and more time still to incorporate all the ideas I had into a coherent document but finally the work was done and Valuing Reality: A philosophy based on the work of Christine Hill was completed.

Nearly 6 years on I continue to be fascinated – and influenced to a degree – by Christine’s work. I have gone on to explore making participatory artworks myself and am permanently preoccupied – as you know – by the role that sound plays in our daily experience of place. The Domestic Soundscape is an area of everyday reality that I feel is unattended to and I am dissatisfied with the idea that ‘culture’ can only be experienced in a gallery or in a museum. I think these are ideas that have evolved in relation to my encounters with Christine Hill and which are all somehow bound up in the experience I had in 2002, in an old schoolroom in Liverpool.

So it is with great pleasure that I am travelling to Berlin tonight to meet once again with Christine Hill and to see her current show in the Bauhaus Modell. I wonder how we will find ourselves 6 years on from our first encounter in New York, and what we will talk about. I shall spend today packing and enjoying a sense of momentousness and anticipation, and when I am home on Monday, I shall give you a most careful and considered account.