While this was a little while ago now, I still want to post about it on my blog! Marking the midway point of my residency, I had a window exhibition at the gallery from November 16th to 23rd. My plans had to change a lot due to several unforeseen circumstances, which were very frustrating!
The dangers of ordering materials online is that you may not always get what you payed for, as I found out. I ordered a roll of tracing paper, and I was planning on creating both drawings on tracing paper as I felt it would work really well against the pine door in the window, and the spotlights. What I thought was a 10 metre roll turned out to be about 5, so not only was I mis-sold and paid for something I didn’t receive, I only had enough to make one drawing, and didn’t know until I tried to roll the paper out to start my second drawing two days before my install day. A nightmare! There sadly wasn’t enough time to order more with it falling on a weekend, and nowhere near me sells rolls of tracing paper so there was no way for me to and drive to get some either.
In the end, I had to compromise and create the second drawing on a roll of paper that I already had, and draw it on the day of the install (I planned on doing this anyway, but added problems mean it took a lot longer). The roll of paper was a lot wider than the tracing paper, so I had to trim the paper down to size to match the tracing paper sheet, and because it was on a roll I had to cut it all by hand using a scalpel and a small cutting mat on the floor. Time consuming and tedious, but it had to be done to ensure they worked together when hanging in the window. The paper was also very heavy, so my smaller bulldog clips wouldn’t hold the paper at all when it was hanging in the window space, but luckily the gallery had some large clips to hand which held it a lot more securely.
However, once they were installed and hanging in the window, it was worth all of the effort! While I wish they were both drawn on tracing paper, I think it still worked well and how I wanted them to, and sometimes you have to make unforeseen changes in your original plans. I learnt a lot from this, that will definitely help in the run up to my solo exhibition in January. They were also quite difficult to photograph, reflections from the window during the day completely blocked out the drawings in the photographs, and the spotlights blurred out the top section of the drawing on the left during the night.
