How do you make a drawing when you don’t know how big it needs to be? Often the size of a drawing is simply determined by the piece of paper in front of you, and in my case it’s normally determined by the size of the space in which I am installing the work. In Paris, I am installing the work on a table, but the specific table had not been confirmed when I began the drawing. So I tentatively put pencil to paper to develop a drawing of undisclosed dimensions with the intention that it would fit perfectly onto the as yet unlocated, borrowed table. You can see where this is heading can’t you!
After some days of trawling through Art Nouveau books the volume of studies had increase, and whilst this activity was thoroughly enjoyable and marginally beneficial, time was ticking. The big string question ‘How long is it’ was looming like an abstract physics equation proposed by a philosopher who only speaks French – complex and seemingly impossible to the untrained mind. Who would have thought that making such pretty work would require me to tackle a question like, how big is a borrowed Parisian table?
Like all clueless researchers I went to the bible of mis/information and searched the Internet for standard table dimensions and whilst that was informative I still had to make a call about wether it might be a 4, 6, 8 or 10 seater. Using a highly scientific sample of my experience with Parisian apartments (2 bed sits, and the opening scene of ‘An American in Paris’) I deduced that Parisian apartments are teeny tiny and so probably a 4 seater was the most you could squish in. However, given K’s astounding ability to make things happen, I thought she would get the big guns and miraculously find a way to borrow an impressively large table, maybe even a 10 seater. I then worked out the average table size by adding the 10 seater and the 4 seater together then divided this figure by 2. As Maths is not my strong point, I got an average Parisian table size of 6 ½ seater, which actually seemed quite plausible – the 1/2 a seat being reserved for Pepe the pampered Parisian pooch.
With this remarkable calculation out of the way I launched into the fun bit…making work.
