the abject object

Quick post as lots to do, but thought you might like to see what it is like to try to put 300 shoes and shoe boxes into a volvo…..

A nerve wracking day looming tomorrow – the collection of many car-fulls of shoe boxes and attaching the shoes inside to an enormous aluminium truss to form an archway. Just hoping for good weather. (please please please don’t rain)

Today I have had a bit of a trip down memory lane, editing some clips together for a ‘club night’ that I have been helping to organise for my children’s school. I had forgotten how much I love doing silly things in an edit suite – so much fun to be have with dancing dogs! Feel quite inspired to ressurrect my ideas from last year (which have become totally overlooked) in making some films and projections – hold that thought……

So in the small bit of time I had left (when I should have been doing something much more urgent) I started preparing the materials for the partner work to

SUPERHERO GADGET (Trap 1 – Birdcage).

A latent fluroescent adolescent perhaps?

I’ve had an insanely busy week so far, with more to come! This week is the ‘making’ week of OLD SOLES. With 300 shoes to be made over the week it was never going to be restful and with a bit of a printing paper misunderstanding and logistical nightmare of artwork turnaround, I have been making daily trips to my lovely printers who have been super helpful and undestanding in the face of many many sheets of shoes. As I have previously discussed – it is finding these invaluable people that make it possible to do tricky things. They are absolutely worth their weight!

So here are a few of the finished items – I think they all look amazing, just hoping that in the interim week before performance day, the kids aren’t tempted to wear them…..

After a period of ‘calm’ (such as it ever is) I am now at a time of back to back MAKING MADNESS. I have many projects about to happen one after the other with little breathing space in between.

So following on from ‘Fallling Fruit’ (one down, 3, maybe 4 if I’m lucky, to go, till Christmas) my next Multiple Participant Project is ‘Old Soles’ starting on Monday.

This will be 275 illuminated giant paper shoes made by the children of Rushden to take part in a perforamance celebrating the end of Global Footprint, a project concerning the Northamptonshire shoe trade. The performance will be by Watch This Space who are amazing, and for whom I did my first illuminated MPP (Fire Totems for ‘Gunpowder, Treason and Plot at Lyveden New Bield) project back in 2009.

The project is getting the children to look at the history on their doorstep, in their town and involving possibly their own families and years and years of heritage. There are some amazing old photos that have been unearthed. Here are some I used to make my sample shoe. I’m sure the ones that the kids make will be a million times more amazing!

Had a great and frantic day yesterday at MK Gallery.

With two 2 hour workshops in which to create ‘Falling Fruit’ – a new edition of the Strained Fruit variety, it was hectic to say the least. Session one hosted over 25 children and produced some lovely work, in a very short and intense time.

Session 2 in the afternoon was, thankfully, a little calmer, and with some materials getting scarce (I can’t believe over 297m of coloured insulation tape were used in such a short space of time) everybody got really inventive with the resources!

Typically I had over-reached with my ambitions for the day and in the melee two planned elements were abandoned. Firstly, as any readers of my Strained Fruit blog will know, the sounds within the Fruitflowers are notoriously unpredicatable and don’t seem to like warm weather – so were refusing to work in the lovely warm gallery space. Secondly, I had planned some new sounds which need to have a bit more movement from the heads of each plant – and had bought speacially an array of interesting elastic with which to suspend them. It was clear from early on that this was not going to happen – I was too tied up with helping in the actually Fruitflower construction to fiddle about with bits of elastic, and secondly the hoop support structure was not wide enough and too flexible to make extra structuring possible.

However these things didn’t really matter at all, and it is yet another lesson to myself (one that I never remember) – not everything needs to be ‘all singing and dancing’ to work.