I’m two-thirds of the way through my 3-month summer ‘sabbatical’ project, though the sabbatical is getting a bit fuzzy as I’m still doing a bit of proofreading to keep my hand in/cover materials costs, and will still be doing exhibition preparation in September I expect. And of course there’s the exhibition week itself, when I’ll be there every day to steward things and maybe do a bit of drawing in situ.
So far things are going more or less to plan.
I’ve only got one more of the twelve big drawings to do and a sitter is scheduled for that. I put together the plinths for the mirror boxes a while ago and now I need to decide whether to paint them and, if so, whether to go with the usual white or something else.
The frame structures for the drawings are about half done. Procrastinating about these was useful as it gave me time to come up with a very simple method of suspending the drawings, using just a 6mm steel rod and two holes drilled inside the frame. I just have to ‘hem’ the drawings to create a channel for the rod to slide through.
I’ve started to apply myself to the boring bit: publicising the exhibition. I have designed a flyer which is now at the printers, emailed the local paper and created a facebook event – as I said, boring! Here’s a link to the facebook event:
If nothing else this summer I’ve practised some basic woodwork and other DIY skills – a great thing about ‘art’ is that it can take you from fairly abstract, metaphorical ideas about isolation and climate change to practicalities like how to fix a drawing to a freestanding frame and simple tasks like cutting dowels for lap joints. And those simple practicalities can sometimes take you back to the ideas, when materials or functional requirements yield unexpected metaphors and linkages of their own.
ideas melt like snow 