One of my former classmates from the painting degree at City and Guilds of London Art School, India Dewar, is in this show.
House of Cards has been a massive eyeopener for me in terms of the sheer amount of bureaucracy and preparation relative to the amount of time spent actually making, that goes into realising a large public sculpture like this. At the moment I need to fill in and return to the site manager freight information forms and forms relating to the installation sequence for the work, how long it will take, what machinery will be needed, what site crew we will need to help us etc.etc. I have been extremely lucky in that my husband works at DTU, the Danish Technical University, where he was able to find a structural engineer who did a few calculations and decided that what was needed was HEB 100, steel construction beams, an industry standard I have learnt, spaced every 1.2m to reinforce the structure against the wind, which can be strong in Aarhus.
Then yesterday I was finally able to meet up with the extremely busy carpenter who will actually make the structure (frantic calls to the childminder to look after my son for an extra half hour..). The build will begin, probably on 20 April, in a carpentry workshop in Roskilde. Once the structure is assembled, I will paint it as far as possible, before it is disassembled, packed and freighted to Aarhus. Then the real fun and games will begin. It reminds me of preparing for an outside radio broadcast (my previous career). You do all the preparation you can, while averting your eyes and thoughts from the actual result, focusing on the moment you just steer towards it and hope all the steps in between will get to you to the desired place on time.
Meanwhile, I learnt that two smaller sculptures I submitted for the concurrent indoor exhibition Sculpture Inside, have been accepted. This was a big boon for me, I studied for a painting degree rather than sculpture, and have always felt – as if I don’t often feel this with paintings or drawings! – that I don’t know how to go about making sculpture. These are a bit random, in that they don’t follow particularly from anything I was doing before, but I am pleased particularly with Lord of the Dance, which really grew out of the materials and I think works quite well..publish and be damned….
I'm a British artist. I lived for 20 years in London. In 2012 I moved to Copenhagen, Denmark, where I live and work. This is my website: www.emmakthomas.com. The key concerns in my work have stemmed from life: the unpredictability of circumstance, absence and presence, the condition of the outsider or foreigner, the marginal and the discontinuous. Landscape and place; feeling at home in many places and nowhere.
