![All photographs of Cherry Road Learning Centre in Bonnyrigg, Scotland, by Alicia Bruce, October 2023, for Harper’s Magazine © The artist](https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/CUT-11-900x0-c-default.jpg)
All photographs of Cherry Road Learning Centre in Bonnyrigg, Scotland, by Alicia Bruce, October 2023, for Harper’s Magazine
© The artist
“Why not try chaos?” asked the artist Lauren Gault, her arms full of boxes and fabric, as she led me to a simple white cube of a room. The room was tucked into the back of the Cherry Road Learning Centre, a sunny building in Bonnyrigg, near Edinburgh. Lauren and Hailey Beavis, a musician, were a little breathless and pink-faced, busy readying stage materials, many of them strung up on wires that sliced the room—enormous lengths of black-and-white silk, oversize balloons, leis and beads, gold plastic fringe. At the room’s perimeter were a document camera, lava lamp projectors, beanbag…