We believe everyone has the right to be creative and by working together and sharing ideas we can enable everyone to reach their creative potential. But I trust that they will grow back deep and soft, and cover the stone once more, keeping their company. We hoard so much of the people that we have loved, without being aware of the way their traces are laid down inside us — voices, words and phrases, the rhythm of their movements, the sound of their tread through the house, the smell of their tobacco, their cough or sniff or sigh or the way that they shudder.

The coloured pencils I’d been using didn’t capture that sense of gathering twilight and I switched to black artgraf (a solid block of ink), as I was keen to explore its expressive qualities.

It is August, there’s a patchy semblance of a festival on in Edinburgh this year, subdued by pandemic regulation. I walk quietly through — a woman on a bicycle and another walking towards me smile at me, almost a welcome, as if recognising a stranger in their hidden land. But the tree at the back is protected from the wind on three sides by the enclosing back walls of tenements. And although they walked along the pavement in groups, their shadows passed in separate single procession — a silent puppet play against the wall. An old philosopher I knew in Moscow told me that his name was from the Ukrainian for tailor, Sukach, from the more archaic sukno, cloth.

In Glasgow, the tune is more likely to be recognised because of the film Eyes Wide Shut, but they still like it. But I was too absorbed in following the movement of my friend’s voice and the shadows passing behind her, holding the two of these together, and could only imagine reaching into my bag for the trapping camera. First attempts at walking drawing: I chose a selection of pencils before I set out and then changed the colour of the pencils instinctively during drawing. On Christmas Eve she was away visiting family, the student on the other side of the landing raised the alarm.At the end was a locked gate, but all the way along, on both sides, were high bushes heavy laden with fruit, this, the professor said, was our Eden.

They had found a source, almost on the grounds of a nuclear power station, looking over to the islands of Arran and little Cumbrae. A ghost house, summoned from the whitewashed walls and thick white tablecloths of London restaurants which must now suffice as places to meet.Instead I take cues from my surroundings; slowing to the rhythm of light, air and sound, trying to establish where I am in space through the echoes in the back court: the burr of wood pigeons and the soft melodic cough of the man in the flat below. I sit on the bench and attempt to draw the bandstand, but I cannot get the proportions right, always it is coming out too constrained, it cannot contain all the arched spaces, and I persist in trying to measure the gaps between the pillars, ignoring the advice I have just given the students.

I had travelled on an almost empty train from Glasgow, looking out at small gazebo squares in each back garden, the separate doll like figures lying out in the sun, turning an ever darker brown. Especially when leaving on a journey, looking back into my room, the waiting shelves of books, as I picked up my bag to leave it.I look down on a mess of bedclothes — a mattress fills the space and the floor about is strewn with clothes and boxes, jars and empty wine bottles. The camera swings and swoops with the expansive runs of the keyboard, the player’s hands gaining force and confidence with the cadences that ripple out as the camera tracks a trail of rubble and destruction, in every room and down the stairs. In the summer the friend who had formed our band and I were out walking one day along the canal and looked down to see the scrubby patch of land behind the pub now fenced off, strewn with sawdust and packed with revellers — outdoor drinking had just been allowed, and the landlords had wasted no time in creating their own Beer Garden out of the muddy bank. I felt at home with these small creatures, reassured by their presence on the wet stone, by their proliferation, even. The papered walls are torn in parts where the children’ beds used to be placed, and you can see back through the layers.