Hills Road – Alumni and Friends

Michael Jefferies

Half-way through the second year my art world changed. In walked Mr Coney, chord flares, grandad shirt, cardigan, collar length blond hair. He had stepped out of a different world, to be precise his Model T Ford in maroon and black, gleaming, and all too soon labelled the Coneymobile. Mrs Coney was often alongside, long black hair, flowing dresses, beads, velvet. The very idea of ‘Granny Takes a Trip’ incarnate, of which I had heard but had little idea, was now live in our art room. We are not going to do painting, he announced, we will make Super 8 movies.

My Art O level may have been an uneven mix of good ideas and awkward drawing but Mr Coney’s art room had its own pull. By January ’75 he had the basic set up to do the very same silk screen prints as Warhol, photo sensitive film that could then be transferred on the screen. Mr Coney set me off to try this out, a fiddly process in the tiny dark room wedged into the wall just before the main art room…after three weeks of failure a beautiful screen emerged from the red light.

A level Biology, Chemistry and Geography plus Dada and animation. The edge of the Fens, the High School hemmed in by colleges. Cambridge set us loose, nothing was beyond us, except possibly the world everyone else had to endure. Not that we knew, we just carried on the everyday of lunch-time absurdist theatre, after school geography games and trips to the ‘ICA’ and I was sketching folk around the school and in exams for collages.