Loom With A View - More Set Up
/I just wrote a blog post using Dona's photos of "The Creative Process" at the Artery setting up my show. Here are my photos. It was sometime in 2016 (maybe the spring?) that I found out I could have the gallery space for a show in November, 2017. That is perfect timing for any show because of the holiday buying season and even more perfect when your focus is wool. I thought for a long time about what I wanted to do. I knew that it should be different from the show in 2014, "Close to Home--Yarn with a Story". There are sixteen posts about that show, starting with this one.
Friends (Lisa and Dona?) said "you should use those old windows that are in back". They were thinking that I could weave using the windows as weaving frames. They like that sort of thing. I like it too, but I haven't actually done much of it. My weaving is more functional than decorative--like blankets, shawls, and scarves. I admire things to hang on the wall, but my house has hardly any wall space, and in my world things that hang on the wall just get covered with dust and cobwebs. Still, one point of doing a show is to move outside what is your same-old-stuff.
I had to choose a name for the show. Loom With a View came to mind, and the theme was set.
So eventually (this photo was from May, 2017) I dug out the windows. There were probably a couple dozen in various degrees of repair disrepair. These in the photo were the best. I took that photo after I hosed off the windows, trying to not chip off any more of the glazing and paint than was already gone. I remember sending a text of the photo to my friends and asking "Do you mean these windows? The ones with the dry rot and termites?" "Yes!", they said. I spent the next several months trying to figure out how in the heck I'd use these in a show in an Art Gallery. (There will be more in future posts about this.)
Wednesday, October 25, 2017. That date was stuck in my head. I had to be Ready. My friends showed up when the gallery opened at 9:30 and we unloaded the truck. All those white cubes were in the gallery from the previous show. The first decision to be made was which cubes to leave for my show. The Artery Display Committee needs to know how many they can use for the other store displays, but the person doing the gallery show gets first choice.
I wasn't really sure but narrowed it down to Not Very Many, keeping some of the larger ones.
Organizing by color.
Half way through the day I needed to get my signs printed for the entry. My friends were going to go get lunch and I asked them to bring back a slice of pizza. They know me well. It was touching that they brought back my favorite beverage, but saved for special stress-invoking occasions like being at the fair all day.
Lunch break.
As Dona and Mary left at 5-ish I think they wondered if I'd spend the night there.
I didn't but I did come back on the next day and the next.
Keeping track of all the pieces in the show by my inventory number and the show number (not the same), entering pieces into the Artery computer, applying barcodes to the tags, applying bar codes to the sales list at the desk, applying sticky numbers to the wall for each piece. I could have used a chocolate milk. I finished up at about 1:30 on Friday.
This is the display in the front window.
Here is my "Artist's Statement". I don't know if you can read it in the photo. I'll get it on my website at some point.
More photos to come now that the show is installed.