I assessed my experimental work on the wall. I am reminded of something Andy Goldsworthy said in his video. He was making a new stone dome on the beach everyday, as it kept collapsing. He said that for each project he had to learn the qualities of the material. I am having to do that with the plastic wire coating. I took off all the longest and thickest pieces and sliced them in half lengthways, and replaced them. This makes for thinned pieces which will glue to the metal wall more successfully. It also gives me more lengths which is useful.
I have started to glue smaller pieces of plastic to the wall, and tucked the two ends of other pieces into the same cable clip to make loops and circles. The design is developing in an incremental fashion, responding to work already done and the shape of the remaining space. My artist’s books are very considered, with lots of planning, research and revision. It feels very liberating to work in an unplanned way. In this process and in the found nature of the materials it is more like a piece of Outsider Art eg the Watts Towers, Facteur Cheval’s Le Palais Idéal or more recently, Nek Chand’s Rock Garden of Chandigarh.
It is very exhausting gluing plastic cable above my head. I am tying it in rough place with string or fixing with blu tac, and after stepping back to judge the design, and rearranging if I am not satisfied, I draw a pencil line. I put glue along the line leaving gaps every 15 cm or so, which is for blutac, to hold it in place while the glue sets. The next day I can remove the blutac and there is a useful little gap left, which I can slip other pieces of plastic under. I have started to make the installation 3 dimensional, with loops of plastic curving away from the wall.
