To continue the tale of the making of Thames to Dunkirk, the 17m long freestanding paper sculpture on my online installation The Dunkirk Project:
Once I had achieved my stack of pages, dried and fixed, my partner Frances and I started the construction. After we’d folded the pages again and arranged them in order, we used several litres of archive EVA (Shepherds Conservation adhesive) to make them into a concertina book – this was slightly easier said than done on this scale, and took us a few days, as I didn’t want the paste to soak into the paper too much and blur the ink lettering, or worse still, make it print on the facing page. Once pasted together, the sections were pressed overnight in our patent Heath-Robinson-Large-Book-Press, constructed from all the largest books on our shelves, with the help of our sturdy dining table. Rather stressful, these few days, as I felt I already had so much work invested, and that anything going wrong could easily ruin the whole thing. But ultimately successful – after a week’s pressing, the work-in-progress emerged as a book, with pages we could turn, all the right way up, and even in the right order. I could now assess the continuity, and was relieved to find that the line of the river joined up all the way along, and that the shore and sky lines on the Dunkirk side were continuous too. Hurrah, success.
Now we had a very large handmade book on our dining table, I started to think it was rather vulnerable. The next few days were occupied in making a portfolio case for it (with sheets of Stockwell unbleached paper from Falkiners, lots more archive EVA, and some linen canvas facing for the spine and corners). This portfolio turned into quite a sculptural object itself, and of course in its turn required protection, so a second, waterproof cover was the next thing we made, with a huge plastic sheet and a lot of duck-tape. This has proved very useful in transporting the work – it’s a two-person job to carry, and we put the handles in just the right place.
By the end of the month we were ready to think about photographing the work. We took a first series of page by page photos on the dining table (where else), but it’s hard to get far enough back from something this big. The Rev. Kevin Scully, rector of the beautiful St Matthew’s Church in Bow (rebuilt since it was bombed to a shell in the war, and now containing a fine collection of artworks) very kindly gave permission for us to photograph there, and even shifted all the pews. It was a great venue, with a shining wooden floor and huge clear windows, so I was able to see the ‘freestanding sculpture’ aspect of the work for the first time, and take a series of very usable photos. These are the photographs I’ve used in the page of my online installation devoted to Thames to Dunkirk, and I think they give a strong impression of the scale of the work, while still allowing the viewer to see the detail.
Next time I’ll talk about developing ideas for the installation, and some other work associated with it.
On the progress of the installation: this is the third day of the daily stories, and numbers of visits to the site have doubled each day so far. I’m really pleased with the response – I was very much hoping for an imaginative engagement in visitors, as well as some more literal responses of memories and accounts, and so far, some really interesting questions have been raised, and some very pertinent points made.
