Help me lord! I shouldn’t really be blogging mid-install, but I’m up at crack of dawn and keen to share my excitement at finally bringing my Neither Use Nor Ornament (NUNO) project to the public.
I’ve never done anything like this before, and there is one aspect to this experience which has pleased me like no other. Surprisingly, I’m chuffed to bits with the exhibition install design. By which I mean the configuration of available partition walls at the OVADA gallery.
The gallery is essentially a raw warehouse environment with myriad quirks built in to the fabric of the building. I’ve spent approximately five months with my mentee, artist Hugh Pryor, modelling the space this way and that. We’ve also needed to accommodate an ambitious installation by duo Neil Armstrong and Dave Edwards, which has meant a lot of building – new panels in awkward spaces, mainly.
One colossal job has been to decorate huge expanses of these clean looking wooden inserts to contrast with the raw space. And this is the bit I’m proud of, it looks terrific already! What on earth will it look like with all the works, that currently rest in boxes and sundry packaging, installed.
Despite the exhaustion of being decorator in chief, I can admire the beautiful harmony of the install, and be proud that we’ve given so much thought to allow a space for everyone which is not only sympathetic to their work, but which will work also as a whole. Somehow we’ve Feng Shui’d it. And it was one essential last minute tweak that swung it. Phew!
I have a million things to think about and a huge long checklist to be printed, which reminds me how difficult it’s been to be both manager and a creative on the project – how little time at the end I felt I had to finesse my work. But somehow I just know and trust that it will come together in this wonderful space. I spend last Sunday considering my piece and arriving at a new way of presenting some of my process, which I’m keen to capture and distill if I can.
My work is very process oriented. It sometimes almost feels like a violence to the process to present a finished piece – though I do love a sense of completion too. The picture of it at the top of this blog post is one I’m especially pleased with and will try to find a space for in my final hang.
Details of NUNO can be found here
