On the 5th of May 2012, the performance of “Making the Unseen of the Seen, Seen” The Lost Histories and Thoughts of Lincoln, was finally performed.

After painting all the trees and completing the lion, Luke, myself and 4 student helpers carried EVERYTHING from my flat to the LPAC to set up at 12.00pm, where 3 more students and a Techie helped set up for our final performance.

After bringing everything across we first marked out where the trees would stand according to my floor plan. Then we set up the entire forest installation. Sadly, we could only use two stage lamps, so instead of using a rainbow of pastel coloured lights we only used a blue gel and a pink gel, which in-fact looked quite pretty in the Studio. The shadows gave it a spooky atmosphere but in a romantic fairy like kind of way.

While in transportation, the Lion’s face and tail fell off.

Over the years since the Arboretum was first opened, the lion has been in a few… accidents. He was once painted red, black and yellow due to vandals. Well after a more in depth study of his history, he seems to have been painted with a whole rainbow of colours, and also lost his tail on numerous occasions. This knowledge was used in our favor. We taped him up in white tape to look like bandages, a comic yet symbolic way to show the past of the Arboretum lion.

The performance began at 2.00pm and it started off well, until,  at about 2.30pm, momentary disaster struck! The lion – fell over!!! Thankfully, two of my student helpers where standing close at hand to him at the time. To prop him up we used the black box which originally contained all the images from the project. It was a good thing it was black because it wasn’t easily seen with in the darkly lit room.

Overall though, I believe the installation was a  success! Even though a lot of things had to be changed in the day ie, the sharing of sandbags, the lion collapsing, but everything else made up for those problems which were out of our control.

Everyone who came to see it, gave feedback, all really enjoying the experience, an the majority of them, wanting to go out into Lincoln to find where some of the images they saw had come from, which is the exact inspiration we were aiming for.

It’s been such a pleasure. I am glad to be a part of something that would be “intriguing, influencing, informative and memorable”, where Luke and I had worked together to create something so good that at first I thought we would never really achieve.