It’s been a really tiring couple of weeks. Leicester was a good experience though. It was good to be able to make a large piece of work again.
The biggest challenge was probably scale. The space was huge, and my work had to have some kind of response to this. After the first day, I had built up a wooden frame – around the size of my last tower peice from March, and this just looked lost in the space. I could have made a series of towers in this scale, which would have been interesting, having the viewer navigate around them, but I’ll save that idea for a future project.
The second day was spent making the tower bigger, and making it look more reminiscent of my source material – the collapsing building. I was also making cement drawings that would become part of the work. Once I had the corner of the structure standing, it was a case of adding bits to extend the walls. I was a also using scaffolding for the first time. It’s an important part of my work that things look precarious, and making work that looks as if it could fall down is important with regards to my ideas, but this is a big challenge. The whole structure was swaying and lots of bits had to be taken away and extra support pieces had to be added. I was purposesly using butt joints when attaching the wood to add to the precariousness. It was difficult, but aesthetically it was the way to go. This structure was supposed to look as if it was built in a frenzy of panic, in an emergency, during some kind of ‘event’. All the evidence that would be left would be this structure.
After some technical assistance, we got the tower standing and stable. It was a frustrating day and it was one of those times when you just want to give up and go back home. Instead, I went back to my temporary accomodation, ate a microwave meal and watched an episode of Star Trek. Rock n’ Roll.
By now, it was Friday, and only a day and a half until the opening. It was a successful 11 hour day of building and getting bruised though. I even had enough time to treat myself to a proper lunch at Urban Pie. Mmm. I spent the best part of the day tweaking the look of the main piece. Moving the srawings around and moving the structure to the correct angle with regards to the other work in the space.
The main feature of this piece was a leaning/collapsing wall. I had struggled all week to work out how I was going to realise this idea. I deciced to make a cube structure, that also looked as if it could have falled from the main structure – this was placed on the floor alongside the main structure, and would also serve as a support for the leaning wall. By the end of the Friday, this leaning wall was still very dodgy and needed an extra support. I had also taken down all the drawing parts of the tower as I wanted to make them double sided. It was a late night in the gallery.
I got in to the gallery early on Saturday to finish everything up in advance of the 6pm opening. I clambered onto the scaffolding and hung the newly double sided drawings. They looked much stronger this way, and more of an object as they were doublesided. They could almost hang alone in the space, and this has opened up further ideas for the future. It required some tinkering and moving about, at one point a darwing was hung within the structure, but this felt wrong and was later moved to one of the ‘walls’. The leaning wall was also completed. It required some careful strengethening in order for me to lose the temporary support. Once it was free-standing, the whole leaning wall got a coat of cement paint and was left to dry to a nice ghostly like finish. The whole work was then moved around several times until I was happy with the positioning.
