Just one more week to go! Katie found a great solution to the glow paint issue - safety paint. This comes in larger cans from Bunnings. The Reject Shop art sections only stock tiny cans. And she's painted the white fabric of the umbrella. White - although I didn't think of this obvious fact before - is the surface that will glow the best...it was only a coincidence that the umbrella I wnted ot throw away was white! Any way, we tried it out in the enclosure and it works very well - a sort of Halloween yellow-green. Later she painted the floral canes (the ones Nicole and Katie had painted white) with a couple of coats and then we sticky-taped them around the central pole of the umbrella and left the whole thing to cure and get as much light as possible.
We also trialled hanging it - it only needed some fishing wire sewn through two of the spokes on one side (so it'll hang at an angle) and one sticky hook on the ceiling. As it's positioned to the side the back spokes are supported by the enclosure. So in W12 the umbrella can be taken into the enclosure collapsed, hung on the hook and opened up.
Although I'd bought little sticky hooks to hang the jellyfish from, we thought that given their weight, these were probably unnecessary. In the end we use sticky-tape. We used a lot of sticky tape in today's studio! So while the big jellyfish will hang on the left, the small ones are grouped on the right (and a smaller group on the left in front of the bigg jellyfish):
Having hung them we taped on the LED lights - grouping colours in what we thought was aesthetic. Next week we'll add a fan to waft the tentacles as well. It should be beautiful.
Next came the coral that had dried all around the studio. The two main issues with these forms was how best to show them off and how to light them. This involved some problem-solving on the fly. At first Katie and Nicole grouped the individual corals on the floor and leant them against the wall of the enclosure. This simply did not do justice to the work put into them - they just looked like untidy lumps. Instead we dug out the polystyrene packaging shapes I'd brought in a few weeks ago and stuck the coral over and around them and grouped them into three areas in the enclosure. Around these - to cover up the floor, exposed polystyrene and the edges of the plastic we scattered a very thin layer of shredded paper. Less was definitely more.
There were then several experiements with lighting. The plan had been to use optical fibre toys. Unfortuantely, Katie's order hasn't arrived. Fortunately, she found that the torches used as tiny theatre lights aimed at the coral (rather than placed in it), lit it to the best effect - lots of depth, shadows and structure revealed. And, this way, it doesn't take very many lights. Less is more again:
The Ceiling: Nicole did some ruminating. I could see she wasn't happy about the small tears in the plastic of the enclosure. The solution she came up with was to stick the torch base of the fibre-optic toy through a hole and aim it at the white ceiling. This produces a dabbled light effect - like a theatrical creation of the surface of the sea. With just a couple of lights we can bring the ceiling into the installation and use it to add another dimension to the effect we want. This lead to thinking about doing the same for the sea floor, but using a torch on a different colour setting. Great thinking processes!
The viewing flap idea needed revisiting. The idea had been to re-use a device with a rectangle cut out of it that Nicole found in the studio. Katie and I had found that in practice it was very clumbersome moving it around all the objects inside. So I suggested we abandon it and simply cut a flap in the plastic on the front side and have people peer in. Same effect - less bulk and damage issues. Katie held a rectangular container to the inside of the plastic. I held the edges down on the outside and Nicole cut! Teamwork.
Katie has been thinking about the soy fish mobile. Again the late order of fibre optic toys was for this mobile. However, seeing the effectiveness of the glow paint, she's decided to paint the fish white and then use the last of the paint over the top, expose the paint and hang from a coathanger. I suggested this was an object we needed to hand right at the front as it'll be small, but effective.
Finally, we tried out the seascape sound effect with my MP3 player and portable speakers and - yes - perfect.
There are a lot of elements to this work and one of the challenges - apart from getting them done has been how best to arrange and light them. Not everything has worlked first time round. That's the good bit about having multiple brains - together we can think of different ways to do things.
For me the process has exposed two things:
(1) Less is more. If I was expanding on this idea I'd use fewer elements.
Either just the soy fish mobile, but much bigger and hung in an arrangement that would make viewers go gosh-wow - I'm feeling highly influenced by Do Ho Suh's Cause and Effect - a massive chandelier of interlocking plastic people.
Or lots and lots of the small jellyfish - a room full - through which people would walk, interacting with the moving tentacles. Not unlike Warhol's Silver Pillows.
(2) How limited I am physically. It was gentle, but essentially Katie would not let me climb and assist in any of the hanging, I tire easily with all the standing in the studio, I don't bend well or far any more and I simply couldn't enter the enclosure once we'd stapled it up so entry was via a narrow slit.
