I have signed my contract, completed an invoice, signed the consent forms, read the risk assessment and printed off my insurance cert and DBS. This all ready for Thursday 20th the Artist Training Day in Dreamland.
I did sit down to look through the staff induction pack, didnt get far as the first page had a large photo on the front of an event I remember very well. It might have been the first big Animate event which was basically just a massive party! Lasted a day. It was a party made of cardboard.
It led onto to memories of other cardboard projects which I have taken part in for Animate. I started to think, what exactly have I made with cardboard? The list is very very long and does wander into the surreal, but I have identified a special top five.
In reverse order:
No.5 A Rain Forest. It covered an entire school hall and you could walk amongst the trees with a friend. A teacher said to me I have never seen anything like this in 35 years of teaching!
No4. Signage for an entire festival site, including finger posts and a series of street names.
No.3 The Favela’s. There were hundreds of these, a shanty town with no crime or deprivation. Colourfull collection of tiny dolls houses. I had to install this installation in three different venues. Which was one of those jobs where you need three arms, but managed somehow with only two.
The memories are now beginning to cross that threshold into real special moments.
No.2 A 10m x 10m cardboard model of London with the River Thames running through the middle. Made with 650 members of the public in the centre of the Festival Hall on the South Bank. Things got off to a slow start where it took me half an hour to explain why I really really needed to use chalk on the floor to mark out ….well London. Managers were paged and consultations with rather a lot of staff members, and eventually we got the green light. But it was the sense of working in a team to create an amazing thing that alone would have been impossible. Achievement still glows out of me when I see photos of it. It was stunning.
No.1 A cardboard kitchen. The reason it is so powerful is because the chips were down, the sleeves rolled up with more to make than you can ever manage and the batteries running low. However, I spent an afternoon and evening with Jo the Director of Animate at the end of an exhausting week, making a modern domestic kitchen in a timber framed country house, this is cardboard remember we were in a giant cardboard dolls house. We made a cooker, fridge, sink with draining board, taps, cupboards, oven with gas hob. We worked so well together, high fives when the egg rack went in. The fridge had a hinged door that opened with milk trays as well, we were on fire, we had a chequered tiling scheme going on. A microwave with buttons, saucepans, blenders and even electric plugs and sockets. Just one of the best days ever. It was like being a real kitchen fitter on site with at work with his mates. Problem solving sharing knowledge and ideas. Exchanging concepts techniques. We were working on a building site. Just that it was cardboard.
Art Builders: does what it says on the tin.
