"Garden for Children" installing Part2
Thank you very much if you came and see them.
Now, the rest of the last blog.
They are the mirrors which is like button badges but backside is mirror instead of pin. They look like biscuits in plastic bags.
I searched same kind of products as I used in UK last year in Japan and I ordered them in Japan, but they were not exactly same and it caused a big problem afterwards, but I write about it later.
Volunteers of students from Hosei University and Tsukuba University helped me to put mirrors in.
We were putting round mirrors into square sewn pockets one by one by hands. These pockets were sewn as small as possible but just you can put them in so that they don't pop out, so it's not very easy and it takes time to get the trick.
It's very hard on fingers as we needed to do taping on fingers, but they worked very hard bearing with sore fingers.
Now the spotlight is installed.
It's almost half way.
It took about one and half day.
It's not finished yet, but we checked how it looks like when we had a break.
The spotlight was turned on, and the ceiling light in the room was turned off, then the voice rose "Woooow".
It pays off our patient labor work.
Almost there.
Edges of the fabric get tucked underneath and sticked onto the floor with double-sided tape in the end,
and finished.
I planned to have 5 days for this work, but it took only about 3 and half days because volunteers of students did a good job.
The day of the opening came finally on July 23.
There was a ceremony and we all artists put a floral decoration on chest like an entrance ceremony of elementary school.
This is the remake of video installation 'lines' that I made original one in 2004.
Animation of black and white lines move vertically and horizontally, spin, expand and shrink.
People can walk on the mat and reflections of the light move in conjunction with peoples motion.
Works were well received.
It was interesting to see reactions of people like an adult gingerly stepping into, a child bubbling over or an adult playing around like a little kid.
But
a problem arose.
Some mirrors were broken.
I had to stay there all the time to replace the broken mirrors that day.
I took apart one of the mirror button and found out the mirror inside was much thinner than the ones I used in UK. It was not thick enough for this piece.
I still regret that I didn't check it before I ordered them.
First I did for emergency treatment was to buy some slippers and make people wear them on the mat for security and it makes less broken mirrors, and I came to the museum after it's closed every day to cover the mirrors with transparent tape one by one so that broken pieces don't scatter.
We eventually had to replace all the mirrors to ones which don't break so easily because the show had to go on over 2 months, but they are quite expensive and I had no idea what to do.. However, the number of visitors were much more than expected and they got more budget because tickets were selling well, so we were able to replace all the mirrors to acrylic mirrors three weeks after the show started. They were a bit easy to get small scratches comparing to glass mirror, but there was none broken until the end of the exhibition afterwards.
Although there was an influence of the another exhibition held in the museum at the same time, they had a lot more visitors than they usually do in curated exhibitions. It was over 80,000 total in the end.
It was quite hard and difficult all through the planning, preparation, producing and maintenance, but I learned a lot from it and it was good that so many people came to see my works and enjoyed them.
I will update the work pages when I receive pictures from the photographer.
