Everything is still looking good up at the park. Not sure quite how many Fruitflowers are still working as I found the end of a balloon on the floor so I imagine there may have been a bit of ‘overinflation’ going on but that is to be expected – how could a small child resist?
As with my previous outdoor Multiple Participant Project working outside with natural materials always produces interesting challenges. When we were installing the work we found that the trees had very strong ideas about which way they wanted the attached branches to lean – not always in the gravititional way expected. After a lot of struggling with trying to go against the flow – I realised that this should have been completely obvious to me – if I had something strapped to me for a fortnight I might have a few views about which way it was hanging too! And it was only when we stopped fighting with nature and let the trees have their say that things became much quicker and easier. This could of course be seen as trying to take the easy route, but the result is that the branches are different to how I expected and strangely better than my plan.
The current issue is now that each time I have gone to check the work, the branches have either started to hang lower or decided that they want to be higher up – no continuity at all! I need to address the issue of low hanging branches as although it looks lovely I don’t want people to be able to reach them just incase anyone decides to do a bit of tarzan swinging. Hugh has developed a good way of fixing this. As for up high…
The trees know best.
