The school holidays have proved to be an interesting exercise in time management! Trips to libraries to collect paper (thank you North Finchley) and two visits to the delightful Museum of Barnet have been family outings. I am hoping that The Museum of Barnet will be able to find some photocopier erratum with a historical link for me to use in 1894 section. Working on the piece has meant snatching the odd hour when one child is napping and the other ensconced in some activity – however I do now feel it is really progressing. Have done the majority of the intricate first layers the lower ones are less complicated as each subsequent shadow projection is less detailed than the previous. The work is beginning to take on more of a sculptural form and extending from the 2D map format into a softly undulating mass.
Whilst making it I find myself reading the paper I am working with. It is an activity that is both revelatory and anonymous: shopping lists, drawings, texts from university courses…they tell me something about the donor but it is only the briefest of things.
It’s been a little while since I last blogged but I haven’t been sitting around watching paper curl as it were. I have collected a great deal of paper from my daughters school and also from the artsdepot which is great except of course it all makes it rather real. I have to admit on occasion I do wonder if I am going to be able to successfully pull off this project. The work is happening – I am at least making it and working within the parameters I have set myself (using paper collected from the community, layering and drawing and cutting the shadows and so on) and it is beginning to resemble something like I had imagined. And yet…I want a broader range of material from a wider community and I am finding it difficult to know how to access this. Additionally, I am fighting with a natural inclination to want to produce an order to the work – to impose my own set of visual aesthetics on it. I suspect I ought to let the work evolve by process alone, which is what gives it some of its integrity but the ‘arranger’ in me wants to interfere. It also makes it difficult when you know 99% of people who see it will judge it purely visually.
I went into artsdepot today and did a mini install which was useful and allowed me to get some up to date photos for this blog. I put it up in bar depot which is where it will be installed for the Big Draw event. When that happens it will be suspended at angle over the bar and not on the wall but it was good to be in the space to see how the scale is working. It needs to get a bit bigger – at least 4 times the size I reckon. If I mange it I suspect I will have lost all feeling in the tip of my right index finger by then! I have also started the second section – from an old 1864 map of North Finchley which is closer and so slightly easier to work – but more of that later.
