Making a scale model of an exhibition space is a lot of work to do in this digital age as there is probably some programme somewhere that does it all for you. I had seen David Hockney do one for his exhibition and a great kids programme on art where Dutch artist Jasper Krabbe made a scale model of a museum space with a fellow sculptor. It was intriguing, looking at scale and space that way.
We were holding an exhibition for 10 textile artists with a variety of different types of work. We had found a great pop up gallery Man in the Moon I decided I wanted to make a scale model of the space and plan it out that way.
I had to do it on a scale of 1 meter = 10 cm. This meant hauling large sturdy cardboard sheets from the shop to my home as they were too large for my bike, which is my mode of transportation. This was my first lesson in scale! We had measured the whole space and it was quite big. Even scaled down it dwarfed my table, as I built it it took up a lot of space. i kept checking to see I hadn’t made a mistake.
First I drew out all the dimensions on large sheets of graph paper. Then I had to draw out on the card to make the walls, cut to size and stick together. This was quite some work as the card was thick as it had to stand on it’s own.
We printed out all the art works and to ensure they were to scale we made pieces of paper to scale and stuck the pictures of the art works on. By doing it this way we were certain that they were correct and to scale. No use having a scale model and then your works of art are not to scale!
It was a lot of work but I learnt so much doing it. I realized that the act of actually physically doing it, cutting the board, measuring it out, double checking what you had done was all a part of a learning process. Being physically involved with all these elements, seeing how scale actually worked, then hanging the works on the model taught me a lot. Things changed as we actually built the exhibition but I had that feeling of satisfaction anyway because I was learning the whole time.
