I've been renting a studio for about a year now from a lovely organisation called Bow Arts. It's a tremendous indulgence, I'm very lucky. It's mostly for doing music. And I've made some stuff in there.
But because Bow Arts have shows (and expect you to participate) I've also made occasional non-music things.
I built a sculpture.
There were various different versions.
I enjoyed filling the nooks and crannies.
I made various bits and bobs to go along with it.
And a sort of conceptual framing for how you 'played' it.
I now regret the final line 'please take your shoes off'. That really irritated me when I saw it at The Listening Room. It's not a church.
But, the open studio that I built it for didn't happen and it took up a lot of space, so I had to dismantle it. I broke some of it up into various miniliths. I think I prefer them, actually.
And I made some more signs to go with them. ('made')
The most recent show had a theme of 'connections' and I briefly thought about trying to do something about infrastructure based on a plumbing leaflet we got from the council.
(I love the phrase 'actual point of clog'.)
But, I'm not enough of an artist to execute what I wanted so I started thinking about the various diagrams and maps I've collected over the years and thought I could do something with them.
I ended up making three things.
They're quite big. A1. But they're hard to photograph. Here are some details:
Excitingly one of them was selected. So then I had to worry about things like framing and pricing. What do you do?
I wasn't really sure. I bought a frame and took it along that way but the gallery manager preferred the way I'd photographed it, just clipped to the wall. So that's how it's displayed.
It's for sale via the gallery but I seem to have forgotten to submit a price. I'm trying to correct that as we speak. It's a prime number. I also have another version which I think might be better - I'm adding various hand-drawn embellishments. (Of course I could be making it worse.) You can buy that direct, it's a different prime. And/or you can get the other two.
I've really enjoyed making these, I'm going to do more. And bring in more PowerPointyness.
But, I'm going to have to move out of the studio. It's expensive and I can't really afford it / justify it. So, let me know if you'd like a minilith.