Spring skittishness is energising the Oxford art scene this month, with a lively evening of performance art having been held last week in the Truwash Laundrette on Windmill Road in Headington. Yes, the laundrette!

The performance Spring Clean 08, by London-based self-styled 'artist and DJ' Esther Ainsworth, is the latest art event run by the excellent ArtWash. This Oxford-based, artist-led project is running for five years and offers a platform to artists to make artworks in a working laundrette for an audience. Once a month, Artwash has hosted video art installations and performance art as well as some pretty bizarre events, such as the crazy golf challenge which had the audience playing golf among the machines.

Despite such outbursts of frivolity, Artwash is a serious platform encouraging artists to experiment with less conventional artforms in non-art spaces. Esther Ainsworth served up a fun evening that combined interaction with the audience and manipulated and sampled sound. Ms Ainsworth, wearing a nylon overall, was a chirpy launderette worker engaging in banter with the audience while doing laundry brought along by them. Her pithy commentary and playful chastising of us as malingerers cluttering up her laundry was interrupted by her intermittently ambling over to her turntables propped on top of the washing machines to mix and replay sampled sound from chit chat she recorded in spoof phone-calls with her mates.

Three odd characters accompanied her and amused us with cameo acts - a bling-covered clubber crashed out on the floor, boyfriend Tony' who took a hip bath while reading a treatise on bathing, and grumpy old codger in a trilby providing sardonic observations.

The fun bit was joining in the repartee and adding to the organised chaos that entertained as it worked to challenge the presumptions of banality in the everyday experience.

Great stuff. It's all going on folks - get out there !

Next Artwash April 20, same venue.