how to count to 50 with a tape measure and scissors

Hey Beautiful People! I thought I'd give you a little "behind the scenes" look at the pre-planning of my next big show Natural Selection, which will show this September at Ogle in Portland. I've been feeling a little nervous about my priorities lately--although it was also very necessary to get my new retail website done. In any event, I have made some great progress this week. First up is my color-coded to-do list, which is a must for all of my projects of this magnitude. I call the palette of this list "Homeland Security" because it's intended to put the fear of God in me, way before anything concrete actually happens. (Although in this case, something WILL happen. Don't get me started.....) I basically made one page per month, and posted it in my "clean studio" to keep me on track. I took this image before I started actually checking some of these things off the list, but the very first thing was to call my friend Fred, who will be building the greenhouse element of this project.

Fred and I met Wednesday at Ogle, tape measure in hand, and figured out the dimensions this humdinger needs to be. The open gallery space is over 18' square, although the wall extends another 18' in one direction beyond a large support beam. I will keep the greenhouse in the 18'square, so it's looking like it will have an 8'x8' footprint. I see the greenhouse as the canvas for this project, and will use the interior and exterior space to do my thing. At this stage, we're talking about framing a really basic house form, using recycled patio door glass for the walls (hopefully getting a donation from the ReBuilding Center for this) and putting a faux mullion on top of that to emulate smaller panes of glass. The roof would be spectacular if I can afford the multiwall polycarbonate (as seen here.) I love that stuff! It was key to start planning the building this early because it's going to dictate how many pieces I make for the inside to get the optimum artwork density I desire.

So....knowing this information, I did a scale model of sorts yesterday. Usually I do this in chalk on the back patio, but it was too rainy for that today. So instead, I created a fake shelf to scale out of paper, so I could get a physical feel for the installation. All of my materials were from my art material mecca SCRAP--I bought this big roll of yellow paper there years ago and it has come in handy oh so many times. The only room in the house large enough to get a decent 8' run was the living room, so I taped the paper down to the floor 8' x 16".

Then I cut oval forms from some groovy old posters from the NW Film Center (another SCRAP find!) that are roughly the size of the bases of my bonsai forms. (They're flipped over to see the white backside in case you're trying to figure out where the macrame owl is!) I laid them out in the desired density, as you see here. For a little extra information, I also cut out rectangles that would be like the plastic botanical name markers for the plants, to make sure they would be readable.

From the looks of this, I will need around 50 pieces for the show. That's a relief, honestly, because I worried it would be more. There will be more, because I will also have some of the plants actually living on the building itself, but this was the number I was most curious about. I have divided out on my checklists the number of pieces I should do each month to just stay on track and not be bogged down at the end. Since I am also scheduling in promotion, it's an imperative part of my process. I'm a lifelong list maker, a trait I inherited from my Mother, no doubt. I love checking things off the list--it feels so ceremonial. I also think it's a great way to chart progress in general. A realistic view on the project on this end, and a feeling of accomplishment at the end.

I am happy to have the blog around to chart this huge project. The last thing that felt like this was my Lovebug installation at the Fuller, which was pre-Bunny with an Artblog. I made a online slide show of my process for that project, which turned out to be quite popular. But this project is even more involved on many levels, so it's nice to also have the ability to write about it. I decided the other day that I want to create a photo album via Picasa and post it here on the blog--it will have images that are also posted in my blog entries, but over time, it will succinctly document the images in sequential order.

I will leave you with two images of works in progress--an orange sponge form, and some slices I made on the bandsaw of a wooden chinese ladle handle. The slices are shaped like orange segments, and I plan to use them as foliage. It's a great example, though, of how a discarded object can inspire form--I may not have thought of that particular shape if it were not for the original source.