Uses for heavy volumes

I started on the task of attaching all of the leaf shapes to the tiles a week or so ago. It is very slow and messy. Apart from a bit of “tweaking” the shapes are transferred at last. 

Obviously it would be a lot simpler to line everything up in the composition if I used a single large piece of paper in the background colour, glued everything onto that and then cut the paper into the 15 parts.

Sadly, life is never so simple. I have found from experience that sticking finished collage work onto tiles like this leads to bumpiness in the background paper (uneven pressure due to textured nature of the work I assume) and so I had to attach the background to each tile first and then add the leaf composition on top. The composition covers the whole 15 tiles and cutting bits for each individual tile independently didn’t make sense to me so instead I have large shapes, some covering several tiles. This means that to get the composition attached correctly, I have to work one tile at a time starting from the top left hand corner, line everything up on Tile 1, glue it down, cut off extraneous parts of leaves that belong elsewhere and then repeat the process with Tile 2,3,4 etc. It is all very taxing and really stretching my brain.

                         (Working panel by panel and cutting off the extraneous bits once set)

Many encyclopaedias are also being employed in the process. We have a set of large, heavy and ancient encyclopaedias that my husband inherited from his father who inherited them from a work colleague. When our children were young they used to enjoy dragging one of the encyclopaedias out and leafing through it, looking at the pictures and reading the strange, 100 year old information. Since they have grown up, no-one reads the volumes any more but they have not been forgotten or neglected. They are a perfect weight to put on top of work being glued to boards (tiles) and I use them a lot. Sometimes I have the whole set stacked up in my studio (luckily just across the passage from the bookcase where the encyclopaedia live) when I have an assembly line of work being mounted ready for exhibition or some other strange project, like this one, is underway.

                                               (The whole composition stuck to the tiles)