I installed the trees today at the Bridewell. Wendy was lovely; she’s got so much to do but didn’t complain. She said I could choose where in the gallery to put my work so I chose one of the corners. I persuaded my son to help me which saved so much time and saved me getting down the ladder an awful lot.
I made far to many trees and am only showing about a fifth of them I think, but space is limited in the gallery. There are 19 artist showing in the gallery space and as many can’t travel to Liverpool until Monday we had to take an educated guess at what space we could take up.
So I had a little panic about how to display the work when I first arrived. I decided I just had to get on with it or it wouldn’t get done! I had to make some decisions that I’m not sure were the right way to go, I could have displayed just one type of tree in the gallery space and another out in one of the corridors, I could have shown them in below one another as to utilise the space but i decided to concentrate my time in the gallery only and really crammed the trees into the space making a thick forest, at the time I thought to myself that there was no point recreating what I’d previously installed at the ‘comma’ shop.
I thought it looked great when I’d only put up the indigenous trees but when I placed the fir trees in front of them a problem of the trees being obscured occurred. I know the whole point of putting the fir trees in front as the replacement, sort of engulfing, drawing in around the indigenous trees was to mimic but also intensify whats happening but in you not being able to see the beauty of our native trees you could kind of miss the point. I need to be able to show the installing stage somehow.
I thought of putting up photographs of installing the work and my friend Carol also suggested that I could take down the fir trees at the p.v to reveal the indigenous trees. I love the idea of revealing this idealistic environment but I the point is to show what is happening in replacing them with fir trees.
Anyway I’ll sleep on the problem, I think an answer might still come to me and if it does I could pop over on Monday afternoon and fix it. Maybe I shouldn’t have put up the fir trees and I should install them at the p.v. but it would be difficult to do this as there would need to be the use of ladders and there will be other artists work around it and as it’s a group exhibition I don’t think I could expect to just turn up and do it, I would have to discuss it with the other first…
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