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Sunday, May 27, 2012

OK. Apologies for no posting in a million years - my sole focus has been gearing up to leave for Bristol and everything else in my life fell by the wayside! But now I am here, in Bristol (in no small part because of the $$$ I raised through the benefit gig at gasometer - thanks again guys!), and my work has been mounted and tomorrow i make the little wooden stands for my prints to sit in. I'm getting help from this lovely girl called Lina to construct them and yesterday we met up to discuss my ideas for the stands, I was more than slightly embarrassed by my less-than-technical drawing of what I wanted to make! (pictured below). The Northern Transept which is where I am exhibiting (and the entire Bristol Cathedral) is an incredible space and quite a challenging one to install art work into. For starters the cathedral is a huge, perfectly formed, saturated in historical significance and UTILE art object, it is constructed so beautifully (and BY HAND) and the scale of it all is so enormous that it is a quite a task to just insert some contemporary art into that corner there... There are no walls that can be used to affix works, obviously nothing can be bolted to the ancient floors, and clearly any attempts to match the ornate forms within the space would look clumsy. Keeping these considerations in mind, I came up with equilateral triangles from 3 x 1 wood, the sides of which would measure the bottom of the prints (either 32 or 47"), one side having a groove set into it into which the prints slot in, the point of the triangle points behind the print. Fingers crossed!!
My all time favourite space in the cathedral is Chapter House, unsurprisingly it is the earliest surviving part of the cathedral (Norman built) and is a site intended for monks to be able to experience silent reflection and prayer. During the install I will steal away and take some photographs of this incredible room! Two weeks of frantic work on finishing off the project, as well as more admin type work for the Bristol Biennial itself, editing text, sourcing bits and pieces for artists to use in their projects, general festival madness. Today is the first day that I have slept in since I arrived, and I am feeling quite reflective! Two weeks have slipped by in a moment, and i already feel melancholy at the thought of only 3 more remaining! Attempts to extend my flight without actually buying a whole new ticket home have so far been fruitless.