Month: August 2009

Basically nothing. I did the work to get it all going then delivered a progress payment invoice to Cath at the Library and nothing for, what, 6 weeks or so. I didn’t really mind because I wanted to do other stuff but it’s getting beyond a joke. I sent an Email to Cath about a week ago and no reply so I guess I’m going to have to go down in person to see what going on.
The thing is that I understand the way I work but I’m fairly sure not many other people do. I get a deposit to pick up a few materials then spend the rest so I’m committed to the project. I owe them. When thats gone, the money, I do some work so I can show some progress so I can get some more money. I still owe them but I’ve shown I’ve started. That kinda goes on until I’ve finished and if the commisionaires are quick with the progress then I’m quick with the work because it keeps me owing them and I always need more money. I only really start to work if I need to. I’m not one of those people who are disciplined enough to do work thats really quite interesting in the formative stages, when its about ideas, but not so interesting when its merely a dull and tiring drudge to the end. Theres much more interesting things to do with hardly any money than work. I am a victim of my own curiousity and unending search for interesting things and ideas that need me to love them.

That said I did go out last week and do a few hours welding and it’s all rusty again, after a clean up, but thats a good thing as the more often its cleaned then goes rusty the deeper the patinas are at the end. So for the artwork this delay is a good thing… but for me and the library patrons it’s merely time passing and nothing happening.

Not really good considering I sent a letter off to Len, the Mayor, the other day with a complaint about the stupidities surrounding how they spend their allocation of arts money… and here I am being the exact thing that has made them so close chested with the cash. Oh well, we are what we are. I’m happy, just sold off a bunch of instruments to keep me in the red.
But I will be welding again quick smart because I’ve now acheived a bit of spare cash to buy nuts and bolts and stuff plus I’ve started working around the house in preparation for Mum gettin’ back from holiday and weldin’ and drillin’, and all the stuff to do with buildin’ the box, is a hellua lot easier than diggin’ and haulin’ dirt, so I’ll be findin’ time of my own for the holiday (from diggin’) that is… bein’ conscientious (paid work).

Sorry about that Folks. The idea was that I’d do a bunch of work then hand in an invoice for a progress payment but over the last 2 or 3 weeks the MCC has been silent so I guess that means, oh I don’t know what it means except no money has come through which means, and this I have control over, that I’m going to now charge on regardless and with the impetus of more work under my belt will be able to go searching for an answer as to why they, the council management, have decided to ignore my request for a progress payment. I’ll now be posting again… because I’ll have done more work.

The Fresh Screen.

Finished up the storage and, God, what do I call it, put upper mechanism? What do we call those things that allow us to put something up… not a shelf though. Anyways I made a big screen for Fresh Gallery and then decided it needed a mechanism to store it in the gallery and as an aid to put it up when it was needed. Now that I’ve made the putter upper, ah!, installation aid, hows that?, it might now even be of any use. It might be but then again it might not. Thats the thing about building things you’ve never built before. You have to build them first to see if they’ll work.

Lets start from the bginning so this makes more sense because I’m fairly sure that at the moment it makes none at all.

Fresh gallery has openings, of an evening, once a month and they like to serve alcohol but there is a liquor ban on the Town Centre precinct so they required a screen made to partition the courtyard they reside in from the rest of the Town Centre proper. It needed to be 14mtrs long and 2mtrs high and of a lightish weight so Ema and Nicole could put it up themselves. Also it had to pack down so it could be stored in the gallery. Ema initially wanted Black Vinyl and with my initial realisation that full size frames on wheels would work and that a sail of sorts was required I told here we needed a fabric of sorts that would allow some wind passing through it because sails and sudden gusts are designed to capture energy and not dissapate it like we required. using Black, or any colour vinyl wouldn’t work. So by luck or circumstance I found a chinese copy of an expensive German Plasticy nylon, most probably polypropylene, fabric that was strong, light weight and was a mesh… that was also cheap enough to fit the budget.

Then I had to figure out how to string up this weight accross 14mtrs and not have it sag so I went looking for garden variety mild steel galv rope of the sort we used to put on clotheslines. In the rope departments all they had was stainless steel which was too expensive and a little too brittle for what I wanted it for. Stainless is good for kitchens and yachts and milk tankers but not for too much else as far as I can see but people seem to think its a good thing so thats what you find out there now. Anyways they still sell the stuff I wnted in the clothline dept, but for how much longer I don’t know, I suppose in a year or two we’ll be using carbon fibre string for clothlines given the modern fetsh for high quality materials in low quality settings to try and lift the game.

But I suppose you get the idea, I’m building a screen and I did, thanks to my Mum and her industrial sewing machine, and I put it up and it worked. But then I had the problem of how can these women who work in an art gallery put this up? Easy, build and installation aid… so I eventually did, but I don’t know if it’s going to be any easier than the way I did it manually. It might be but what it really needs, this storage device cum installation aid, is an additional steel guide rope so the small footprint on the holder of the screen can be adequately fixed at it’s vertical extreme. But today we’ll see if the girls can put the screen up themselves or answer the question of whether another little bit of work is required.

It’s always like this when you don’t really know what you’re doing but have done enough stuff of a similar nature to be able to push the bounds of what one is capable of acheiving.

Mangere Bridge.

I was down there last week and saw them demolishing the old toilets and so got off an Email to Priscilla at council, and who also lives in Manger Bridge and is part of an Art group there, who heads Art something or other asking about finding the people responsible so I might get a little work. This is in progress but it brought up the idea of drawing up a map, alike the London Subway map, to denote how council works and where and how departments interact and have control hopefully to enable outsiders to see where they should go to have these public servants… serve the public.

The thing is that as soon as you see the council up to something, in a concrete kind of way, it usually means they’ve been planning it for months, if not years, and the chance of making any changes is very slim at best. I’m not even sure what they’re accountability is in regards to this and whether or what things they have to notify about and where and how this notification takes place. Thats why a map is needed.