Barbican

The evenings at the Barbican were really interesting. The exhibition is a mixture of very abstract looks at the idea of colour and various installations. This means that nothing tells a story or shows colourful things as such. You might have thought that this would mean that there's not much to write about. Not so! People had plenty to connect with. I wrote about a fire extinguisher. The fire extinguisher isn't actually in the exhibition. It's on the wall next to an installation called 'Red Room (Child)' by the great surrealist artist Louise Bourgeois. You look in through a window and see a lot of slightly disturbing red things, like two red hands holding each other.

I found myself attention caught by the fire extinguisher that was next to the work of art and somehow it all connected with a slightly disturbing event from my childhood when a boy broke into school and squirted a fire extinguisher all over the place. When I've polished it up a bit more, I'll put it up on the site.