Just got the link to this... oh dear. I'm no early bird - scotch meat and sausage eggs - that should be sausage meat and scotch eggs. Not to worry, the work isn't scrambled, just my words.

In the last few days, I've really been hankering for a fully fitted on-site kitchen, with all the gadgets, toys and gizmos a bod could want. A residency at a restaurant would be heaven - to explore food within that context, explore some groovy stuff like jellies and blancmanges, develop some of the techniques I've touched on - icing a tiered wedding cake as a conceit - there would be decadence and glory in it's ornateness; seafood, shellfish, and the scallop, which has a very interesting history; sugar, and all it's forms: blown, whipped, boiled, toffee-like or frosted; I deliberately didn't use chocolate with it's strong association as comfort food, sex-replacement, a womans addiction - too much baggage - and it's brown. Sounds like a silly thing to say but brown can be unappealing, and this was all about presentation - the thought of eating these assemblages is another story, but removed by the perspex box.

I've said everything I wanted to say, got it out of my system, had a laugh, suffered a trapped nerve from stress, seen it go up like a dream and fall down like Colossus, encountered some oddballs who insisted they would eat it, some brilliant feedback and some comments that puzzled me ("Turtle Tits on Toast", about 'Charity begins at Home'). Give someone the opportunity to give their opinion and what do they come out with? Someone commented to me earlier this evening that it can be a bit daunting to write in someone else's book. What more can I do to make it accessible? - there, in the 'recipe book', online here, and I'm there most days for one or two hours - that's the way I work, and I wish others worked that way. I feel very strongly about the issue of public consultation and blog about it: madelainemurphy.blogspot.com/peek-boo. We have all suffered others decisions about how tax-payers money is spent - that sterotyped hetero couple outside Victoria Station, Southend On Sea, he returning from the London commute, she embracing him like he's returned from the wars. I have to consolidate the fact that there are parts of Essex still in the 1950's. (I haven't used tax payers money on this, I paid for everything myself, just before you start...)

It's given me a lot to think about. Above all, the constraints of working within a business - the Cafe Society has been brilliant, and have done everything to make the process smoother for me. I was surprised by one comment - 'the lemon muffin was lovely but the service was too slow' - unfair, I thought, watching the speed at which they work. If that comment appeared in my 'recipe book', did that person think that food on display was part of the business? Where was the line? Where is the line between advertising and display and something that transubstantiates itself into 'art'? Is so much of life ludicrous in the first place that rhyme or reason isn't saught? Is 'art' itself a matter of perception, or just a signature? To stimulate others curiosity is certainly a challenge, and maybe people do want visual chocolate, after all.

At least I can now work in the privacy of my own home again, and for that, I am eternally grateful.

Most artists love to be seen. By other artists, curators, critics and anyone who shines adoration on them generally, a sort of narcissistic existence. As if the world needs more images, objects, expressions of culture and society, reflections of ourselves, expressions of wealth and hedonism, of consumerism and idols. This unquenchable thirst for existence justfied  through recognition or celebrity status and artwork as a way to get there. Get an artist to admit that and they're probably called Jeff Koons.

A friend of mine has a rare medical condition: she doesn't recognise peoples faces automatically, so whenever I see her I would give her a longer greeting than is normal - this gives her time to register the sound of my voice and my accent and 'place' me,  so she can compose herself, rather than suffer the discomfort of not recognising someone.

Here's the point: how do we know, or recognise each other? Personally, my face can stay out of it, but when someone sees my work - sees me - what I'm about, what I'm trying to say - well, that's rare, a joy to the soul. I received this comment from John, who visited the Dovecote in early July:

    Hi Madelaine

    I get the birdboxes! I did spot the flake and cherry one earlier! So birdboxes made of food as a medium to express         sexuality amongst other things.... Love the way you push the boundaries but incorporate so much humour in your             work. I like working with metaphors - gets the creative juices flowing.

    ....

    If you are in [another area], do let me know.

    Yours

    John

For this person to 'see' me, is brilliant! Unsolicited, part of a conversation. That's rare. The 'what my work is about' conversations - interested and engaged onlookers, the explanations, the 'ooh' moment - that is great, but those who just 'geddit', that's something else.

I'm sure there are those who wonder why I use food. The artwork has to be thrown away at the end of the day, and the covetousness (and I am too) to keep artworks is certainly there, but the sentiment, statement, viewpoint, the communication and connection will never have an expiry date. This, to me, is to be really seen, to be recognised, and for me that's what it's all about.

Many thanks, John.

I was asked a few days ago by a colleague as to what time I would be setting up. That is - they would come along with a video camera, and film me putting one of these bird boxes together. Out of comradeship, I said yes, and was extremely relieved when they ran late and I had already assembled everything, and out of politeness, I had waited there.

It's an act of intimacy to undress in front of someone, and just as much, I think, to get dressed - wandering around, trying to look in some way elegant as the clothes go back on in reverse order. It can be tricky to appear graceful about it, and applying make-up is the one thing I think blows away any illusions: the finding of the loss of face (think Dangerous Liasons, as Glenn Close wipes her face away)... It's an area of fascination for some, but not for me - and many a painter has approached the subject of a lady at her toilette, and the viewer of the painting - the intention of the artist, it's a subject in itself.

It's been far tougher than I had anticipated. The conditions for food in that perspex box are harsh - overheating from the midday sun; no air circulation, condensation, discolouration; sugar-based food melting and becoming soft very rapidly. That's what happened with Old Mother Hubbard: it literally couldn't hold itself up. Of course, there's always the onlooker - and he shouted -"it's falling, it's fallling, it's GONE" as the just-assembled birdbox fell apart, off the plinth, and all over the floor. Straight face, pragmatism and give it another go, but after two and a half hours of struggling to get the gingerbread to stay where I wanted it to, I gave up, chucked the lot in the bin, put up a sign, and went home to start again. Insult to injury, I had to pay for three hours parking instead of the 15 minutes I had blissfully visualised.

Food doesn't travel well unless it's airplane food or canapes, and frankly, as much as I would like to work in the privacy of my own home, it's not possible. Customers at the Cafe Society are polite and only stare occasionally, and wonder what I do. if they make eye contact, and look at me quizzically, I'll stop and explain, and the moment of revelation, as they understand what they are looking at, dawns, and then a smile. That's the moment for me  - when someone pauses and takes it in, and understands, rather than the whisking away of the cloth or the flinging open of doors to the Salon. Watching me get it together is that less graceful moment that will always be private for me, and to take it away - well....

"Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder."

Advent, 1938, Patrick Kavanagh (1904 - 1967), born in County Monaghan and lived there as a farmer, a cobbler and a poet until he moved to Dublin in 1939.

There's nothing worse than no way of telling the artist what you think - the art is there, in the public domain - 'site-specific', we call it - and we're wondering what on earth is that, who on earth made the decision to put that there and how much did that cost... a fine example in the newly-rebuilt Victoria how-many-lanes that have unravelled from the roadworks. Here we are: www.southendstandard.co.uk/news/8943172.__50_000_sculpture_for_Vic_Circus_is_revealed. 58 comments later, there are some sated critics lighting cigars. Public consultation is always a tricky business, and maybe that was sidestepped with Councillors looking for Value for Money. Blimey.

Here on my home ranch, considerably less storm-in-a-teacup - but some lovely comments, and some not so lovely, you'd wonder who would be so unsavvy to air quips that possibly belong elsewhere. Anyway, the 'veggie option' got me thinking about the ethical aspects of what I'm doing - I had thought about them anyway. My mother is an excellent housekeeper - nothing left to waste, food seasonal and freshly cooked or spiced and preserved (she still uses a recipe that includes gunpowder for her Spiced Beef at Christmas), and the old dictum 'waste not want not'. Quite a puritanical upbringing but having been a child during WW2, running a tight ship was part and parcel of doing one's duty. I consider it a challenge to produce what I'm doing with efficiency, conscientiousness, clarity and purpose.

To produce an artwork made from food that lives for only one day seems, on the face of it, to be hedonistic, wasteful, and trite, but for me - the outcome - the end product - is the stimulation in others to comment, the communication, shared or different beliefs.  I can see some of that happening in these comments, and with the dialogue that I have with customers to the Cafe Society, as I set up each morning. I value, just as much, the photographs that come from the artwork, and these will stick around far longer than what's in the back of my fridge.