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March 22, 2008
a long day
Today I woke up from a night of feverish, worried dreams to find that I'd somehow sweated out all that worry in the night, and got out of bed in that state of calm that so often happens when a deadline is so inevitable and so close that you no longer have the time to procrastinate, to make food or have conversations or do anything but work, work, work right up to that deadline. It's a strangely quiet out-of-body feeling, like when your ears pop and all sounds come to you as if through water. I worked, steadily, filling in the dress tags with the typewriter, folding and collating pages for the books, arranging all of the book images (yes, that's right, I still have to pretty much make those books tomorrow, all twenty of them). I helped Jessica to frame her large prints, and we felt so confident that we even made wheat starch paste for her hinges from scratch (from flour!) and ate lunch away from the studio. I carefully measured and cut my book cloth pieces for hanging the maps, cut wood, drilled holes in dowels and put little pieces of waxed linen cord through them. And then I started gluing the whole thing together, and disaster struck. Well, near disaster. The hanging system I had envisioned for the prints is not going to work. Or rather, it would have worked but it would have taken me all night and cost me my sanity and more importantly would have looked like utter crap, unprofessional and half-assed and lumpy. So I made a snap decision (with Jessica's counseling) and made some changes. The installation method that references maps has had to be scrapped, and so I now don't have to make that map legend (that's right, I hadn't done that yet either) because it no longer makes sense for it to be that literal. The dress tags won't make sense on the maps either and so will now be on the dresses, which I think will actually be much better and will better help viewers understand what they're looking at when they flip through the books (which are images presented with only stamped dates, no text). I feel good about this.
Tomorrow, then, I will get up in the morning and put on a project dress for the last time. I will make the books. Prepare the dresses. Finish stamping dates on the dress tags and attach them to the dresses. Reassemble the drawers. Then Monday morning, a few brief errands downtown, box up the books and dresses, wrap the cabinets in bubble wrap. And take it all to the Museum and forget all about it until I go in and install it on Tuesday. What am I going to be doing on my blissful Monday night of freedom? Spinning up one of the leftover big prints on kozo with a borrowed spinning wheel, in time to bring it along to this week's conference as my knitting project for the van ride: a lace wrap that I will wear to the exhibition opening.
Posted by jodi at March 22, 2008 11:14 PM | categories: the rules
Comments
How have you found spinning the paper? One of my friends prints these amazing etchings of hand-drawn tatted lace, then she shreds the paper (thin tissue paper, I think) and twists it by hand into yarn, then twists several strands of this together to make it rope-like and ties various knots in it. She can't really do long strands this way, and we've been trying to figure out how to do it on my wheel. I did a few tests with a heavier-weight paper, but had no luck...
Posted by: crumpet at March 25, 2008 02:21 AM