A commission unfolds... Part 1

It's always an interesting journey when somebody asks you to do a piece for them.  I think I am getting better at it - trying to ask the right questions, checking that we are seeing or thinking along the same lines, testing ideas early and then pretty much just getting on with it.

A friend recalled a piece of mine she had seen several years ago and we were trying to remember just what it looked like. I was at dinner at another friend's house and remembered he had bought it, so I asked if I  could borrow it back to show the commissionee. That was lucky - I had not photographed it before selling it - my bad.

We knew she wanted it embossed; on a concertina fold coming down the piece, so far so good. She brought along ideas about having the words go across, come down and be read both vertically and horizontally. So off I went.

I had to do a lot of maths.  I knew the depth of the frame that our local framers had; and I knew that the height of the paper when folded had to be less than this, because we also need to include mat board and the glass, so way out of the deep dark recesses of my mind I pulled some trigonometry and worked out how high the fold could be and therefore how wide each fold was and how far apart they could each be. Seriously left-brain work for a creative!

The first time I wrote it out I felt that it was unbalanced because of the big gaps between letters for the vertical words due to the concertina folds (we knew we needed the letters on the top of the concertinas to enable it to be read if hanging on a wall).

So I wrote the horizontal words with equal space to match the vertical words. Although the words looked better balanced in a way, this made it rather enormous, so I rang her and suggested she pop over and see what she thought!

We agreed it wasn't working, and in particular, she felt that the vertical word letters were kind of hanging there, unrelated and it took a while to work out you should read down not across.  We joked about "elo elo elo..."

So then the re-working began; which words would we use; how would we lay it out if we didn't use a crossword approach and so on...but that 's a story for later down the track. It's part of the process of trying to work with somebody to achieve what they had held in their imagination or mind's eye and translate that into something can be realised.

Despite the challenges, in so many ways it is a privilege to work for somebody like this - to try to make something as beautiful as they thought it might be...