Something of a long post tonight, but then the opening of our "Home is..." show seemed to deserve a properly detailed entry on the blog.
In our experience, no run-up to an exhibition ever goes smoothly, and this was no exception... We thought we'd document it here just to show the kinds of things that can go wrong, in spite of the best laid plans. We were roughly on-schedule in the summer holidays, despite the major alterations to our personal lives with us becoming foster carers part way through the project. There were some images we hadn't got round to shooting, but we had a decent body of work to select from. We sent off pictures to the printers, and as has happened a few times before, as soon as we entrusted something so vital to another party, it started to go wrong.
A specification of the gallery was for flat-mounted work in the downstairs room, and we duly ordered three of the prints to be Dibond mounted (basically printed onto large sheets of aluminium). And after a lengthy delay, they turned up in the box above about two weeks before the show, which was cutting it fine to say the least. Suspicions were raised by the extra corner padding which seemed to have been hastily added...
... with reason, it turned out. Multiple corners on all three of the Dibonds were mangled, ruining the pictures. Panic setting in, an anxious 48 hours was spent in consultation with the gallery (who were incredibly supportive and understanding), local printing firms, etc, and three replacements were sourced, which would be delivered to the gallery four days before the show opened...
The back-up option was to print the images A1 size and frame them; the best frames we could get within budget, having spent several hundred on defective Dibonds for which we couldn't at that point get a refund, were available through Ikea (a higher quality solid-wood frame, not their bog-standard Ribba frames which we've used in the past, and which have a distressing tendency to dismantle themselves over a short space of time due to poor materials). Unfortunately the frames are rare as hens teeth, and we were on the verge of having to drive up to Newcastle after work to buy the last 4 in the country. We'd already had to ask relatives to pick up the A2 frames from that branch the week before, the local store in Leeds not stocking them despite the details on the website. On top of that, and for further stress, the printers we used managed to delay or lose our larger prints on two separate occasions.
A call from the gallery on Tuesday confirmed our personal suspicions that the re-printed Dibonds would be significantly smaller and would look lost in the main gallery. Thankfully Karen and Graham at Cupola had a good idea for a scenic backdrop for the chair. We arrived on Thursday morning with extra prints, a load of toolboxes, and a big roll of astroturf, and got to work.
My wallpapering skills are woeful, but we (with the considerable assistance of Graham) managed to get the woodland backdrop up on the wall, including dealing with various lumps and bumps and the fact the gallery is in a nice old building with no right-angled surfaces.
Deciding where the extra prints would go took a surprisingly long time...
The above pic is from about 5 hours into the process, with it all finally starting to come together.
And above, the upstairs room, which was home to the bulk of the framed pictures.
With the work up on the wall after some seven hours work, with the assistance of Graham and Karen, it was time for the finishing touches; some mounted but unframed prints of the show (and some of our other projects, for a bit of variety), a couple of self-published books to accompany the show, and business cards, displayed on some of the free samples the AstroTurf suppliers sent out to us.
The set from the shoots forms a nice eye catching, and interactive, centrepiece for the show. The use of the AstroTurf and slate was planned from the start of the project, and its nice to see how well it works. Mind you, its going to take me an age to scrape it up from the industrial-strength tile adhesive and repaint the gallery floor after the show...
And so, with three weeks of manic stress getting the show ready, delivered, and up on the walls, the opening night rolled around.
We've been to a few opening nights here over the years, but this was the first time in a while its been for a show that wasn't a group or open call; there was one other artist, Becki, exhibiting alongside us in an adjacent room, and frankly it was all a little nerve-wracking.
Big thanks at this point to Graham (above) and Karen (below) at the gallery, not only for accepting our proposal for the show in the first place, but for all the support, help, and dealing with the emerging chaos in the last weeks as printers failed us, work didn't turn up, etc. The gallery has been magnificent at coping with it all and giving us everything we needed to get this show up.
So that's that then. Its been a long road getting here, from the early days of Amy's original concept shoot for the project back in Carlisle in 2005, the test shoots a few years ago, and the manic summer of shooting images for "Home is..." at 5.30 onwards most mornings last summer, all over Wales and the Midlands.
Its not over of course; this show runs until mid October, and then we have plans to try and find other outlets, venues, and avenues to explore with the work. There are still dozens of locations we'd discussed as potential backdrops for images around West Yorkshire and the Midlands, which we had to regretfully abandon due to time constraints... we plan to shoot a few more images over the winter months if possible.
A big thanks to everyone who modelled for the shoots, who assisted, and who contributed in any way shape or form. Special thanks to the Severn Valley Railway, East Riddlesden Hall (National Trust), and all the other locations we were able to access for shoots. And of course a massive thanks to everybody from Cupola Contemporary Art for commissioning us to do this exhibition, giving us the chance of a big show, and providing us with a 'target' and an incentive to shoot such a massive project.
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