At the end of day one I was feeling quite anxious. We had spent the first part of the day walking about and gathering materials to work with. We kept returning to the need for bricks - but a phone call to Ibstocks had put us off finding some for free - so we were looking at buying them piece by piece. 
We had explored the ABC cinema site, and then decided to excavate some of the relics to be found there - bricks, bits of old pot and ceramic.
I wanted us to have a costume of some kind, returning to my comfort point - I find costumes make me feel better. Maybe its part of my disguise, I find it easier to work in public with some kind of protective cloak. We chose quite domestic looking outfits really, aprons and protective gloves, this seemed appropriate as we were collecting broken bits of crockery.
We collected the relics from the site and returned to the AirSpace back yard to set up a work station to clean and clear up the materials. 
I like the way it became quite a contemplative activity, we spoke in bursts, sometimes about the work and what we were doing, but also about all sorts of things.
Overnight I though about what we had been doing, and realised that the conversations had were very important.We arranged that I would go and buy bricks in the morning for the building of our reliquary. I like the idea of using bricks for something which is usually ornate, and overblown.
An amazing thing happened - you met someone who told you that there were tonnes of bricks at the Spode site we could use, so I went across there first thing Thursday morning to get some.
It turned out that these were part of the BCB show, and they had too many, so we could choose from an array of different coloured and differently made bricks. We had discussed using overfired dark coloured bricks, and there were some there that there were perfect. They were called Weinerberger bricks and ranged in tonal colours from black through to purple, and even gold.
We lugged them back to the gallery. Somehow having these weighty objects in the space felt good, we are getting somewhere.
We talked about the shape that the reliquary could be, and thought that a domed one might be good but hard to build. We marked out the circle on the ground, and then set to work on building.
We tried a range of formations. The structure started to resemble a bottle oven, something which I was a bit dismayed at. Images of awful civic public art flashed before me...We finished it anyway, and then took a break for lunch.
On return from lunch we started to work on a block version. We had discussed the Muslim Kaaba, and the idea of pilgrimage and religious celebration of deities hair. I wonder whether that big black box affected us in some way?
We tried a small footprint, and then a larger one, and eventually hit on our favoured shape, and rebuilt for perhaps the fourth and last time. By then we were both getting quite tired, not being used to this sort of labouring...Once complete we had just enough time to get changed and head over to the Spode site - for the grand opening of the BCB where your eels will be revealed.So now, here we are this morning, we need to make a poster which explains our piece, and print out and finish this blog, and tidy the gallery. Better get on with it...
No comments:
Post a Comment