Well, the installation is duly installed and I think it’s OK. I’ll get a better idea tomorrow evening which will in effect be the private view for the Dragon Hall exhibiting artists. It’s a ‘sponsor’s party’ and performance evening in the Great Hall, so I’m hoping that quite a few of the partygoers and audience will find their way to the undercroft!
In the end I gave up the idea of projecting an image into one of the alcoves. It just didn’t look the way I had envisaged and with all the loose dust in the undercroft I feared for my overhead projector over the three weeks it would have had to remain in position. The image was to have been a photograph of the lower part of a poppyhead. Projected onto the crumbling wall below the vaulting, I hoped it would have a very ambiguous effect (see accompanying pic).
But I realise now that it was an unnecessary addition to the installation anyway, and that it works better kept very simple with just the TV on a plinth and two ‘portraits’ on twin plinths in the adjoining alcove. The bound A4 Kalender omnibus sits on a lectern near the stairway into the undercroft, and all the copies of the current Kalender are piled up on top of one of the enormous barrels that have a permanent home down there.
The one improvement that we’re intending to make is to sneak in tomorrow evening before the party begins to connect an extra pair of speakers to the DVD player. At present the sound comes only from the TV monitor itself, so if we position the speakers in different parts of the undercroft the soundtrack will hopefully form more of a soundscape.
