When I started making daily people in January, I was intrigued by the way limp fabric could become firm simply through wrapping and tying. A few friends to whom I showed the project were surprised to find that the people had no armatures, because they had a lot of structural strength -- that was the whole point of my exploration. But most of the little guys didn't have enough structural strength or balance to stand on their own.
So when I got the opportunity to put them all into an installation, I needed to retrofit some skeletons into practically everybody, extending into a peg that could be fit into a drilled hole on the base.
Some of the people were constructed so I could easily run a support wire up under their skirts or thread it up inside their legs. Others had been wrapped so tightly, and perhaps had some internal folds and creases, that I couldn't force wire through the center of a leg, so I had to snake an external wire up the back of the body, secured by their original wrappings.
That's how I spent my weekend, with wires and wirecutters. I could have saved a lot of time by putting the wire inside in the first place, but would that have been any fun? Heck no!
I'm almost done with the installation -- I'll show it to you soon.
But was it a whole lot of fun putting in the wires afterwards? Always hard to figute these things out in advance...
ReplyDeleteI wonder will viewers put an interpretation on why some have wires inside and others outside. Irene from Northern Ireland
ReplyDeleteNone of the wires should be visible to the guests sitting at the table; all the little people are facing outwards and the wires go up the backs of their legs. At least that's my hope!
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