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.

 

Here are all the audio  “Leaves” (pieces of documentation) that will be used in the forest installation.

 

Audio

 

Childhood Castle

 

Arboretum Pond

 

Arboretum Picnics

 

Band Stand Bells

 

Ghost Stories

 

Arboretum Childhood – Part 1

 

Arboretum Childhood – Part 2

This is the chosen sector of the Arboretum of what is being scaled down.

 

 

I measured Studio X’s length, width and most importantly, it’s height.

 

The results were these;

 

Length – 30 feet 22 inches

Width  – 10 feet 113 inches

Height – 92 inches

 

I also plotted out exactly where I want the trees etc to stand on the actual show day. To show what item goes where understandably, I used green electrical tape and a symbol to indicate each type of item;

 

 

With these images in green tape I potted out the locations on where they would be within the room to this diagram.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In total there will be;

 

• 24 trees at 6 foot 6 inches each
• lion statue
• Lincoln Imp statue
• Bandstand
• Fountain
• Giant ring

 

 

 

 

 

 

I told Dan my plans and ideas about the lit up (and modeled) woodland in Studio X. Which he liked, but so make it more Site Specific we agreed that the woodland shape will be based on a scaled down section of the Arboretum. I’m thinking just beyond the main entrance where the bandstand and the wonderful stone lion resides.

 

Also, we talked more in depth and the audio element, which has been slightly left behind lately due to the reformation of project etc. In a previous meeting Conan advised us on what questions we could use (see previous blogs to recap) yet he was a little worried that we might get one word answers. So both Dan and I thought long and hard on what Luke and I can do about this. In the end we came with this conclusion;

 

• Considering we have three MP3 players we could have a different question on each.

• As like for the single tree idea, we can record people’s stories of Lincoln on one. This will give longer answers so we would get three to four stories for MP3 player number 1.

• On another we can ask, “Where is your secret place in Lincoln?” These will more than likely will result in one to word answers, which if all the recordings of this question are put together it will sound interesting in it’s own right. So for MP3 player number 2, we’re thinking about having 20 to 25 sound clips.

• On the final MP3 player we can ask “Tell us a fact about Lincoln.” This may seem as a daunting question for some people who may not know anything about Lincoln, but those that do will be giving a new insight to the audience about Lincoln. So we think that we will get a sentence or two from each person so we can record about 10 sound clips for MP3 player number 3.

 

Now, to start creating this forest installation.

Finally an idea came to me a little while before I met up with Luke on Tuesday.

 

We met up on the stone picnic tables outside the Main Uni building by the wharf, even better we were surrounded by trees on such a warm sunny day – perfect picturesque surroundings to tell Luke of my new idea 🙂

 

You may remember that I (for some reason or other) have a thing about trees. Well years ago I watched a home decoration program and they used this most wonderful wallpaper by Cole & Son called “Wood”;

 

 

This wallpaper got me thinking. Plus the fact that Conan suggested that we perform the piece in Studio X, a small studio in the LPAC that has recently been redecorated with black floor and black curtains. A black box. What if we made white trees like the ones on Cole & Son’s wallpaper in Studio X, to create a mini forest – bringing the outside, in. The images and the MP3 players hang from the high branches as like before. White paper mache miniature copies of some of the statues from around Lincoln such as the Arboretum Lion and the Lincoln Imp hiding in between the trees in the wood and some clever use of coloured lighting, maybe even some pretty fairy lights.  A fantasy of Lincoln, the hidden version or if Lincoln was a real forest, a forest of buildings and statues?

 

I truly believe that it can be not only beautiful yet visually enchanting and inspirational. Multi-coloured lights shining onto the white trees and models, giving depth and a fairy-like picture to draw the attention of the audience to influence them to go deeper in the forest and search for more.

 

Luke even added an idea to this, “What if the trees represented the buildings of Lincoln? Like, the base of the Cathedral growing a forming the top of the tree.” Clever boy.

 

Bibliography

 

Website

Cole and Son, (2012) “Contemporary II – Woods” Online: http://www.cole-and-son.com/collection_detail.asp?CollectionID=13 (accessed: 20th March 2012).