JUAN ISAAC SILVA

Sunshine Gray's room

The room

It's a white room with light grey floor boards, one pale apple green wall and a white bed.

Not a large room, it wants to be bigger than it is. It tries hard to maintain the spaces between the bed and the writing bureau and the chest of drawers and the chair.

The low bed is flanked by two small tables with tapered legs, their night time detritus kept to a minimum. The tables echo the style of all the furniture in the room: a hint of Scandinavian design, a whiff of charity shop, a suggestion of impoverished legacy.

At the single window, overlooking the usually quiet street, hangs a pale green Venetian blind, kept almost closed. This room is at the dark side of the house but, at night, the Venetian slats allow orange stripes from the streetlight onto the white walls. Sometimes, on a bright afternoon, the sun reflects on the windows of the house across the street and creates the same stripes in buttery yellow.

Where there was once a miniature Art Nouveau fireplace – when the house was built in 1900 - there's now a white radiator. Above it hangs a modified kitsch print of moonlight over the sea. If you lie in the white bed against the apple green wall you can let your eyes wander over the moonlit sea.

In the alcove that the chimney breast creates there are three white shelves above the chest of drawers. The lowest shelf houses a jumbled collection of primitive terracotta pots brought back from Brazil, Greece, Portugal. On the middle shelf is a non-functional vintage radio.

There's another vintage radio on the black writing bureau and two more occupy the shelf above its cupboard doors. One of these radios tells a story of wartime and fatherhood and pillage.

Sometimes, in this room, candles are lit, flowers bloom, a plant breathes, a black cat curls up on the white bed or a sheepskin by the radiator, a laptop hums.