GRIT

for the past 6 years there has been a collective group exhibiting in the port adelaide area as part of the fringe festival. deb and i have been a part of it each year. this year the theme of the show was GRIT.

but instead of exhibiting in a gallery space, we ended up exhibiting in the old packing shed of the old flour mill. its a great old space, that just needed some work to get it ready for a public event.

the old walls, peeling with paint are beautiful

 

and some of the shadows and surfaces were artworks in themselves

Aside from cleaning out debris and left over stuff, there was a hole in the floor, with random stuff in it. instead of cleaning it up and filling it with timber Deb and i decided to make an artwork installation

with a thick piece of glass, it safely shows visitors what lies beneath

although that does mean it is very very hard to sell.

then there was this bit of floor along the edge of the room. It was not safe to leave it like this with the public entering the space

 

so Deb and i took photos of the grim and dirt and dust in the gap and then covered the gap with wood. We printed the images from before and had them printed to scale and installed a photo collage on the new timber

 

it looks really great, and was a nice artwork in itself

 

again hard to sell.....

 

and one other bit of floor that needed fixing, again we documented it before covering it up and then created a poster to show what it looked like before.

 

but all those artworks happened once we were in the space and inspired. our original idea was to use the grinding grit we normally use in glass cutting and polishing and make a giant gritter ball.

 

it really is better in person, but the grit sparkles, and of course the disco ball motor keeps it turning. not bad for a over sized beach ball, paper mache and some grit and glue!

more on the rest of the exhibition can be found here.

oh and we won an award, more on that here.