Making it Real

I wrote in my previous post about how being mentored (shout out to Margret Petrie!) has altered my sense of the possible and enabled me to put together a bio, artist's statement and images for submissions. My response to the "Who do you think you are?" gremlins has become... " I appreciate your concern; now let's hear words of encouragement".

Recently cleaning paintbrushes on an old copy of the Visual Artists Ireland newsletter, I saw the space for exhibiting my work - so totally what I had envisaged as the perfect place.

So - here it is...

A few of my pieces in the gallery space.

And then ... some of the work in another, very different gallery....

Ok ... joke over - what you're looking at is a cardboard box.

The back story - in one of those AHA! light-bulb moments, I realised how I make plans and hoped-for outcomes real for myself - I make a model.

When work was to be done on my house, I built a scale model complete with kitchen units and 18" thick walls. While on a committee undertaking the conversion of a 19th century village school into a community/heritage centre, I constructed a model of the whole building - because that made it more visually real than the architect's plans.

And when planning larger pieces of 3D work I've always built maquettes, so it made perfect sense to construct a tangible representation of what I visualised.

1/10th scale...

The real, full size thing

I was about ten when I made my first doll's house out of shoe boxes; working on a small scale is familiar - although I admit to chickening out of replicating the smaller pieces, and not everything translated well to 1/10th scale.

It's taken what seems like forever to finish the models - that whole business of everyday, such as eating, sleeping, laundry, shopping, sucks up so much time.

By making these, it's not that I believe I am putting it out into the universe in some magic way that will definitely make it happen. It's about being open to possibilities; moving into a different mindset.

One of life's questions, often at difficult times, is "why me?" The answer is of course, "why not?"

My question is .. "Why not me?"