After we shot The Green Building/10b (man! do Terry and I ever need to talk titles! I hope he's better than I am) we took a break for lunch and headed back to Woodberry to shoot over at the Tractor Building at Clipper Mill. From the beginning this was Terry's favorite location. All during the process I was looking forward to this piece especially the color combination but was always a little nervous that the wall would respond like the rusty metal did during the Paper Chain shoot. Lucky for us the post-its stick like a charm and we had to do very little reinforcing for durability although we did end up using balls of masking tape at the end to get that last flower to go faster.
The flowers in this pattern were borrowed from a William Morris design in a book my mom had sent me when I was starting on this project. Working from original needlework patterns ended up working quite well rather than designing my own like I usually do. I was a little worried that I'd feel less connected to the sculpture in this piece since I did a little less of the design, but I like that the piece has a connection to William Morris. He's on my imaginary Top Ten lists of designers and I look at his work a lot but have never Incorporated any of his designs directly into my work. I like that my little shout out to him ended up temporarily stuck to a building in my neighborhood.
Here's Terry taking 1 of about 95 photos he shot of this space. The finished image (which we'll post soon!) is horizontal and has so much more information in it. Also, his camera didn't capture the glare on the paper like mine did so the color is super vivid. You might notice Terry wears his Nikon baseball cap backwards when he shoots so it doesn't interfere with the camera.
Back when I was still brainstorming about this project I so badly wanted to work more dimensionally. I'm quite comfortable being a "very flat sculptor" in fact the phrase is in the first line of my artist statement. During the brainstorming phase I kept wrestling with the idea of dimensionality and wanted to use this project to push myself in that area since the end piece would be a photograph and therefore flat. Ironically, now that I've seen the images the I think flattest pieces are probably the strongest.
We've made a big effort to not only leave each site perfectly clean as if we had never been there but also to recycle or reuse everything from each shoot. Lucky for us the parking lot next to the Tractor Building had paper recycling. Here's the piles of post-its all mixed in with the office recycling.