Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

We’d been loaned a swipe card which let us into the chapel. Octagon realised that their transients would never agree on a form of worship: there were Buddhists, Catholics, Greek Cypriots next to Turkish Cypriots, US fundamentalists, flag-worshippers and total abstainers. The chapel, once the focus (social and ethical) of the community, had been reconceptualised (and left out of Octagon’s brochure). Patterns of coloured light from stained-glass windows played on a brilliant parquet floor. The altarpiece was curtained off, but we had been given permission to look at it. Madonna, gilt. Niches, stone vines, elaborate iconography: symbols of discontinued superstition (that the developers were superstitious enough to preserve).

A new cross-substitute had been erected in front of the altar: a basketball net (black tree, white halo panel, string bag). The floor had been polished for a purpose. The chapel was now a basketball court, divided into zones and quarters. The Jesus figure from the stained-glass window (scarlet loincloth) gazed down on the spectacle: an athlete sponsored by Nike. The saints and apostles were witnesses of a new cult: narcissism, conceptual exercise, the squeak of rubber soles on pale wood.

Going for a double-header, we walked back to Egham, to visit Royal Holloway College. Renchi was keen to exorcise the theft of Queen Victoria’s hand.

We stopped in a pub, an average English summer’s day (wickets were tumbling in the Test Match), then marched up the hill. The College was as strange as the Sanatorium: twin cloisters, an excess of windows, a history that overwhelms present occupants. Having entered one set of cloisters — panned around in amazement — we located the wrong statue. Victoria occupied the other court. Trying to figure out a way of getting close to the royal pedestal, without backtracking, we lost ourselves in subterranean passages, kitchens. An alarm sounded.

Had we set it off? Intruders. It went on and on ringing. Students, unconcerned, ambled into the cloisters. Corridors, staircases, walkways were deserted. We had the place to ourselves. A fenced-off rectangle of grass, a statue; red brick on all sides. An overemphatic alarm.

We found our way back out into the grounds, circled to where we hoped to discover the entrance to the second set of cloisters. By now, fire engines were arriving on the scene, bells jangling. A dementedly civilised episode: dons in ermine trim, students in black gowns, tame clergy, garden party females. Lovely dappled sunlight. Degree ceremony interrupted by this irritating bell, fire drills processed as per instruction. The whole mob have to stand, making conversation, under a tree, waiting for the all-clear — which no one in authority is prepared to sound.

A lawn sprinkler shudders and jerks. Rainbows dazzle in the stream. The blackened statue of the queen is framed in an archway, behind dignitaries and students; behind the security men who are blocking our access. Through my long lens I can see that she suffers from no deformity. The hand, if it was ever missing, has been restored. The original, buried in a Hampshire garden, can stay where it is.

Renchi almost made it, the arrival of the train at Alton; we were standing with the young artist, an awkward group, in front of the phone-in sandwich bar, as his car pulled up. Then, three or four simultaneous conversations interrupting engine noise, we were off, moving through soft countryside.

Being driven, being a guest — and then a guest of a guest — was disconcerting. The house, in the village on the edge of Salisbury Plain, was an accumulation of other houses, red brick extensions, converted stables, potting sheds with conservatory flourishes. The selling point was the mill stream. With lawns, vegetable gardens, clouds of white blossom.

The house was deserted.

The doors were open, we wandered through, and out into the grounds. Nobody challenged us, nobody was seen. Renchi, naked head wrapped in blue bandanna, was in shorts, sandals. A LEARN-SWAHILI T-shirt. He squatted on a plank bridge, a black dog beside him, hoping for a walk. Green water, reeds. Country time ebbed around us, as we sat, strolled, waited.

The day was warm. The mill stream, the moist greenery, made it bearable. Would it be possible to live in pastoral suspension — no traffic noise, no military helicopters (just then), free-flowing water, dropsical bees? Would it be feasible to paint, to produce work at the stupendous rate Sara H achieved? Why not let it all go, feet in stream, dogs sleeping in shade? A little light gardening, raspberry picking, when the sun went down.

Out of this trance came the call to lunch. Odd chairs, indoor chairs (walnut, oak, rosewood) brought outside: all shapes and sizes, around a long table. A selection of used hats are offered: shapeless fishing things with flies, broadbrim stockman, baseball, battered Panama, Van Gogh straw. The Chinese/Vietnamese sculptor, a neat person, sun specs nestled in hair, is astonished by this ritual. She declines, flinching from the notion of communal headgear. Most of the others go for it, something to keep off the midday sun.

An empty house, grounds given over to large black dogs, and then out of nowhere a mob around a long table. Who are they? We’re too English to find out or to make proper introductions. It seems that an elderly male occupies the main house and that others, daughters, ex-partners, future partners, friends, associates, camp somewhere on the property. Sara paints in a cupboard.

A pike has been caught in the mill stream by a man everyone says should be a TV gardener. The mythic monster was brought ashore in a net improvised from chicken wire. The flavour is ancient, almost meaty. It’s a subversive act to taste this flesh, cool, ivory-green, rare; afterbreath of decay disguised in a creamy mayonnaise ointment. Bowls of brown potatoes from the garden. Jugs of fruit juice.

Sara is quiet. We know that the meal, however welcome and well managed, can’t be allowed to stretch too far into the afternoon. It is the hospitable preliminary to the move indoors, the viewing of the paintings.

Processing through the dark cool house, Sara’s early paintings are pointed out — lemons, dogs, prize cockerels. ‘Red is always good. Red sells,’ a lady with smoked glasses and rings (who hopes to promote Sara’s new visionary series) tells me.

Stairs creak. Family plunder, more than a single household can store, takes up all the available space. Houses lived in for generations become museums of the familiar. There is always an attic, a space under the roof where the reserve collection, unattributed cargo, can be hidden away: universal memories, the dream-sludge of lost childhoods. One section of the Wiltshire attic bows under the freight of Sara’s dictated paintings. Her audience sit, or squat, in an outer chamber, as she carries her work through, painting by painting, several hundred of them, and each with its own narrative.

We’re in the old nursery. White cupboards. Stolen light. The managed effluvia of banishment, frustration. Rest hours that spanned the eternity of a summer afternoon. We can’t move. We’re trapped in children’s chairs, wedged. If I stand up, the chair comes with me.

The spirit guide, who arrived at a time of personal crisis for Sara, let it be known that her task was to produce twelve sequences, each sequence consisting of a hundred or more linked canvases. The room we are sitting in is too small for this news. As an audience, we shrivel: our reception of the descriptions Sara offers — precise, slightly robotic — shifts from shared excitement to indifferently disguised boredom. Claustrophobia.

Mad, isn’t it? The blue paint costs £ 20 a tube. The guide says that the next series will require larger canvases. Sara is rapidly depleting her financial reserves, rapidly filling the nursery with paintings that look like maps, dreamings, motorway junctions. You can’t make aesthetic judgements, that one canvas is better or more achieved than another; they are produced so quickly — and wheeled into the room where we’re sitting with no break in the monologue. Sometimes there is an anecdote, sometimes we’re told that an area of the painting refers to a pre-birth memory, pain cluster, the resolution of a psychic drama. What appears to the casual eye as abstraction is known to the artist as the record of movement through time, a journey. Technically the paintings are difficult to transact, certain lines in certain colours have to be laid down first. The guide is firm on that point. The background is painted last — without muddying outlines already set in place. The whole process sounds agonising. But Sara doesn’t complain. She answers our questions — which are hesitant. Nobody knows quite how far they can go with these revelations — sympathy, awe, bemusement? Other artists are invoked — Klee, Kandin-sky, Bernard Cohen — but the comparisons aren’t helpful. Sara isn’t refining a style; she’s a technician, a willing stenographer of the unconscious. Notions of Aboriginal art, songlines, Navaho sand paintings, are more appropriate. If Renchi is looking for a way, through his walk around the M25, to find a topography sympathetic to his romantic sensibility (part documentary record, part vision), Sara seems to have accessed that chaos map. Renchi’s task is finite, 150 miles of liminal wanderings and the circuit will break down into columns: salt, sand, chalk, dirt. Accepted symbols. The white canvases of Sara, with their weavings, dark loops, are infinite. No way out: the impulse to create won’t be appeased, there is no evidence for the landscapes her maps describe.