Having finalised the construction method for House of Cards, I have been busy completing the proposed installation sequence for the exhibition organisers, and trying to finalise the budget. I found out that one of my grant applications was successful! I have received 15,000 Danish krone (about £1500) for the project, in addition to the 10,000 I got from the exhibition organisers. I have also had two rejections, one from the Danish Arts Council last Autumn, and one from another private fund, Beckett Fonden. Still…it feels like a minor triumph to have been granted the money, especially since I laboured through the application in Danish. There are still a few outstanding, another score would be very much appreciated.
Meanwhile; the devil is in the detail they say… I began checking dimensions of wood/steel. The sculpture – of which I include more photos here, since I realise there is only the one at the top of the blog – is to be built of a wood frame, clad with støbekrydsfiner. This I think might be called coated plywood in English. Once sanded it gives a much smoother surface than ordinary plywood, since it’s coated with plastic. The structure will be reinforced with steel construction (HEB) beams, but these can only be inserted on site at the point of installation because the sculpture will only just fit in the lorry for transport anyway, in parts, without steel beams sticking 80cm out of the bottom. So the solution (such a Danish phrase…! They love talking about ‘solutions’) has been to design channels into the wooden interior frame, for the main three part structure anyhow. These will house the steel beams once the thing is erected. That means you need a good fit though, and in the past few days I discovered that 10x5cm wood actually meant a variable, ca. 9.5cm x 4.7cm wood, and that 10x10cm HEB beams actually meant more like 10.4 x 10 cm.
I am also having last minute dilemmas about paint colour. The original maquette I made was sprayed with aerosol spray, but I quickly realised I couldn’t do that for the full scale sculpture. It needed a paint gun. But matching the colour of the paint to the maquette is proving a headache. I have a number of sample panels laid out in the studio and am systematically trying different paint samples. Of course I didn’t undercoat the original maquette, I have realised, so the fact I have undercoated my samples (partly to aid adherence of the paint to the plastic coated plywood) with white, also means they come out lighter. I’m now faced with a situation where the closest colour match is like a slightly cold putty colour; I prefer a warmer tone, but the one I have is much lighter than the maquette. Coupled with the fact that my maquette is tiny and the surfaces in the final event will be much larger, and seen outside, probably in bright sunlight (it will be June), compounds the problem of which paint I should go for….headache!
