Now in the final run up to my exhibition (and I promise never to mention it again after October) my husband suggested drawing out the walls of the gallery on graph paper (he was a draftsman in another life) and cut out all the paintings and sculpture pieces separately to scale. My first thought was how tedious, the very thought of all that measuring and working it out mathematically, but then my husband has brilliant spatial awareness, and always does things properly.
But…when I realised, I could print out little tiny pictures of my artworks and rearrange them on the graph paper walls, my visual senses became engaged. I have a penchant for miniature things especially if they are well-made and to scale ever since someone gave me a perfect miniature enamel baking tray as a child (I wish I still had it). However, trying to make my pictures fit match the right scale was another story – in my mind’s eye, artworks appear to inflate.
But the representations of the little paintings were endearingly cute and reminded me so much of The Borrowers, the book by Mary Norton, with tiny characters, Homily, Pod and Arrietty who borrowed small items from the human world and repurposed them creatively. I still love it to this day. Perhaps this was why I soon began to feel like a god in my virtual paper gallery – changing and rearranging walls at will.
Slowly patterns of colour, scale and subject matter began to emerge and in an instant all the previous worry and spatial overwhelm melted away. The miniature framing of the pieces gave me dominion over them and enabled me to distance my artist self.
As I worked on clusters and groupings of paintings, my husband came up with another brilliant idea and spread out a huge dust sheet on the floor so that we could lay out the paintings in the real. And then something else began to happen, occasionally there would be one painting that just wouldn’t sit right with the others, it would keep getting put to the side or squeezed into another group. Eventually three of these problem works were taken out altogether. It felt as though the process of arranging and rearranging sifted out the weaker works like a quality control filter.
So now all we have to do is number, label and put hangers on 80 or so paintings and 20 ish sculptures – not looking forward to this but the really hard part is already done, thanks in large part to my supportive and patient husband.
