Show Time

I can announce that the first of my panels went up in Aylesbury's Great Western Street last week. I went down at the weekend to have a look. My reaction to seeing a piece of my work slapped five metres high and about thirty six metres long across a public space was essentially English: I found myself doing a sort of dance. You have to understand that this wasn't an American-style high-five air-punching victory dance, it was a sort of hopping shuffle on and off the kerb born of the profound desire for there not to be a fuss. I was pleased; it did and indeed does look pretty damn good (you can check it out on my web site), but it was all a bit much really and could I now be excused to have a cup of tea and a sit down? It turned out that I wasn't to be excused until my husband had taken many, many photographs. It was minus five that day and my embarrassed squirming had turned into a hypothermia avoiding jig before he'd finally finished.

I've been back a few times for a better look and have reached the point of being able to flirt with the idea that it's a fairly big achievement. It's a bit hard to see the art at the moment to be honest: the panels have a blue protective film over their surface and the whole thing is surrounded by scaffolding and a fence covered in strict warnings about hard hats, steel toecaps and who to call with the remaining digits of your right hand in the event of an accident.

It's great to see a whole section in one piece. Anyone who has, like me, spent happy hours with Airfix kits will understand that there's magic in the moment when seemingly entirely unconnected parts of a model all come together (for some reason I had a thing about making bi-planes when I was young, I made lots extremely badly and never painted any, littering my bedroom with pale blue-grey plastic debris). However, there are still gaps and an unfinished section to complete. I met the site manager Derek who is responsible for overseeing the installation of all my panels in Aylesbury and he was extremely keen for the work to progress. He was very nice about it, but I get the message: there's a few dozen men in reflective vests awaiting my finished work and sooner would be better than later love!

Christmas Story

The house I rent while I am staying on the Isle of Wight is about a half hour commute from the factory and, since winter came, has been a drive to and fro in the dark. As my last visit coincided with the start of Christmas, there were various displays of lights en route. The garden centre had fairly freaky lights on their conifers which, in combination with my enamel dust filled eyes, danced alarmingly in and out of focus Bridget Riley fashion, causing me to drive past at geriatric speed each night. The real stunner was in Sandown itself. The wattage was so powerful and the combination of religious and festive icons so varied that it was a couple of days before I managed to make out some of the detail.

One of the things I noticed was a giraffe in blue twinkling lights. Now I went to a fairly high church Anglican boarding school and we had plenty of religious instruction. We had our own chapel and in addition to the usual daily assembly service we had evening chapel twice a week, Communion Wednesday crack of dawn, Compline Friday evenings and full services Saturday and Sunday. Come Christmas there were a lot of extra services and I emerged at seventeen with an encyclopaedic knowledge of hymns, ancient if not modern, and a fair grasp of the King James Bible. Nowhere could I place a blue giraffe in the Christmas story and yet I drove past it each evening, large as life and beautifully detailed.

Finally I decided that the thing to do was to go and have a proper look and see if there was some sort of African twinning theme happening. Imagine my utter disappointment when I walked up to the building from a different direction and discovered that my beautiful blue giraffe was in fact just an ordinary tree draped at random with a string of lights, reliant entirely on the angle of the road and the height of my mini to conjure it into life. I thought about this, wasn’t happy and decided that there was a bit of space in the Christmas story for a blue giraffe after all. What if one of the wise men (wiser than the other two and perhaps with kids of his own) realised that no young mum, however inexperienced, would let her infant near frankincense, myrrh or gold pieces so, knowing all babies like bright colours and soft toys, took an extra baby-friendly present in the shape of a blue giraffe?

Listen Again

I've never been a fan of rave music to be honest. Actually, if I am entirely honest, I'm not very good on the subject of music at all. I dread the 'what music do you like?' question which usually wipes my mind entirely clean of any music related information. It's not that I don't like music, I do, but I like such a bizarre selection of fragments that it defies band, style or even genre. My brother-in-law and I sat down with as many CDs as we had in the house about a month ago and he complied a play list for me. After a trying few hours he looked at me kindly and said 'You do know it's really only music to do other things to?'. Since he lives in a flat insulated entirely with CDs, I guess that's me categorised: "likes music to do stuff to" which brings me back to rave music.

Thanks to Kev and Dave I have found that the stuff to do to rave music which makes it really, really excellent, is to pitch up in the 4.30am darkness when there's only the three of you awake, the furnaces are welcomingly blistering and getting six panels fired and back is viable before the factory fills up at 7.00am. I should say that I was late, they'd both been in since 3.00am, but I'll try harder next time we get a backlog on my work. It was early enough to make eating rum truffles at 7.45am seem perfectly reasonable, much as the porters in Covent Garden downed early morning pints, but I don't recommend it - it catches up with you later believe me. By 10.00am I'd been at Guy's stash of paracetamol, by 12.00pm I'd scored Pro-Plus pills off Dave and by 2.00pm I was only awake thanks to the sugar rush from a brick sized piece of Colin's birthday cake. I stuck it out until about 5.00pm by which time I was ready to lie face down on any available flat surface which is exactly what I went home and did.

I came home on Saturday on the early ferry clutching a hamper of Island produce courtesy of Wells. Why they should be so kind when I'm well aware that my need for random access to the furnace must make my visits a nightmare to accommodate I'm not sure, but I'm going to enjoy eating the lot. Again Red Funnel came up trumps in the costume department. This time it was a ferry man in full Father Christmas costume with his own lavish beard. As I was climbing back into my car at Southampton I heard the following exchange: small child "Santa, what are you doing on the ferry?" Santa, without hesitation and with exasperation "Nipper, it's my day job. Six more hours of this and I have to get back to the North Pole for the sleigh, so get back in your car and stop bothering me with your questions." Classic.

The Shipping News

It’s been a long gap between blogs. That’s because there’s been a long gap between visits to the factory. I am on my way back now, sitting on a fairly empty Red Funnel ferry making valiant efforts to hack into their wireless network. I’m somewhat distracted by a pair of toddler twins sitting on the bench opposite. With exactly matching red hair and blue eyes, they’re both dressed prettily as snowflakes* and are watching me with total fascination (I have had a quick mental review and quite what is so engaging about a woman in a lumberjack shirt tapping on an old laptop is a mystery). It’s getting a bit disturbing to be honest and the temptation to suddenly shout ‘BOO!’ is becoming very tempting. Though there’s something of The Shining about them so perhaps best not…

I was far too early for my ferry today thanks to Tim, my sat nav (Tim was the English voice; Tod was the American who sounded frankly annoying and, being American, unlikely to handle roundabouts and London traffic well). Normally I have a stop before Southampton for a coffee, but today Tim took me on a strange and depressing circuit of Southampton’s suburbs, religiously avoiding anything resembling a coffee or tea shop, tipping me into the ferry terminal an hour and three quarters early. However, I’ve managed to get on the ferry before my booked departure no questions asked. This is an eternal mystery to me. Sometimes, like today, this is completely OK and I’m straight on. At other times asking for early admission is acceptable, but will cost an arm and a leg after a stressful session in the ticket office. Sometimes I’m not even allowed into the ferry port and have to wait in the overflow car park in disgrace. None of this bears any sensible relationship to the number of cars waiting to get on the boat, nor has any Islander been able to explain it. Answers on a postcard please…

*costume and the ferry: last time I crossed it was Halloween and extremely crowded. That time I squashed in with a baby disguised as a pumpkin and five zombies who ate chips with an enthusiasm you wouldn’t expect in people haemorrhaging badly from eyes, nose and mouth.

Changes

My mother-in-law has instructed me to write a new blog as she's tired of waiting for an update. Apart from being flattered that she's interested, I think it's fair exchange for lending me her entire kitchen floor as a layout pad, her light box, pencils, pens and oldest son for the day while I designed a new section of landscape for the enamels.

When this project started, I thought I had things stitched up - all the panels designed, planned, consigned to individual template sheets and ready for production - I'd been two years in the preparation after all. You can tell it's my first public art project and I have stumbled into it a complete innocent as it has now become obvious that lots can change, change and change again.

The main change has been in the actual contours of the cladding: what used to be areas of smooth curves now have doglegs and bends, doors and differing levels. While I have the comparatively easy task of redesigning a few areas of artwork, it's the project managers, steel workers, sprayers and furnace men that have had to get their heads and the sheet metal around these new curves and bends. For them this has meant building jigs and special firing platforms, making doors for the first time ever and generally going about things in entirely new ways.

If you see this finished artwork in all its glory, take some time to look at the panels themselves and their construction - there's an awful lot of thought, invention and cooperation in them which is just as skilful and, in its way, creative as anything I've done for this project.

Shimmy

I have a promotion of sorts here at the factory: Kevin and Colin have decided to let me take my own artwork to and from the furnace, something which has previously been done by Dave (Dave is now holidaying in Cuba where I would like to think he is sipping lush cocktails and enjoying the odd cigar with his wife-to-be). The promotion comes in the form of trusting me to manage the journey without disaster.

To remind you, I have my six precious custom-made metal trolleys for moving my work. These fit the 1.2m x 2.4m panels and are pretty solid. They are fine for swinging about in my studio space, but are singularly dodgy for travelling. To get a panel to the furnace, I have to weave it past other work which is stacked at random angles almost everywhere. There is nothing better designed to chip enamel than more enamel on the move: it is fragile stuff until it it safely installed. Add to that the problem that the stacks of other work (which can range from Aga tops to Boris Johnson's 'Don't drink on the Underground' signs) are balanced on trolleys made up of slats of metal effectively little more than stacks of knife blades on edge and you can see why Colin and Kevin are being so brave in letting me do this.

Progress is very slow and, compared to the men, I am painfully cautious. Even so I managed to knock a panel badly (much laughing and thankfully it was a dud one which I have suspicions may have been left especially balanced to hone my skills). The lift is particularly difficult, Kev manages to exit controlling a full trolley with a flick of the wrist at speed. I can only manage it by backing out bottom first, freeing the trolley with a sort of full on Josephine Baker shimmy.

Hmm, call me slow on the uptake, but it occurs to me now I write this that I may just have worked out exactly why I've got the promotion and why everyone's being so very patient about it...

Blue Sky Thinking

I was interviewed for the local Isle of Wight radio yesterday along with the management. The man who turned up was very kind, while he couldn't be expected to be as absolutely charmed by enamel as I am, at least he was absolutely charming about it. All went well except that he asked one fatal question which went something like 'and how do you know you've got it right?'. I laughed in the slightly maniacal tone often favoured by Joyce Grenfell and explained that the dispatch guys checked every panel for alignment and colour before they were sent up to Aylesbury.

So with the dispatch team watching my back all should be well, but after the interview I got to thinking about the day's six panels. As I said before, the six panel waltz is best taken as it comes. I have done an awful lot of planning and preparation, I do check constantly for alignment and colour, but I don't think about the whole thing all at once, not until yesterday at least. Trying to take a considered overview of the situation when some were done, some downstairs, some half painted and one still propped up against the wall was silly - but it was a desperate and long few minutes while I stared at what I had, thinking that it couldn't possibly all be right. Then I realised that I was looking at a couple upside down and sanity was restored.

Trouble is that the sky in my pictures can as easily be at the bottom as at the top and, like most normal people, I'd failed to take that into account while panicking. I should explain that I see landscapes pretty much as a series of appealing shapes which lock together in a patchwork. Sky is useful as a backing cloth to hold the pieces together and, as such, can logically be as good below the landscape as above it. At least I've stuck to blue sky for this project: that's not always the case in my prints, but I figured that the townspeople of Aylesbury are in for a big enough shock as it is...