Little Houses

~ little houses ~

Recently I was asked by the Anchor Art Space in Anacortes if I would be interested in coming up with an art project that would tie their current exhibit titled "Shelter" in with the town's rather large Arts Festival.  I said yes of course not having any idea what I would actually do.  I had a month to figure that out.

Little houses on the sidewalk, little houses in the gallery.....

On day one of the project I was stationed in front of the Anchor Space and I started making many little cardboard houses that would eventually be a part of something bigger.  I temporarily trailed them from inside the gallery out onto the sidewalk.  The biggest realization I had that first day was that wind moves paper easily.  Pretty obvious I know but I hadn't thought about it at all.  The next day I would be building a structure much much bigger out of cardboard and I would be doing it a block further down the street where the wind could be much stronger.

It was a beautiful morning on day 2 and I began by creating a foundation that was weighted on the corners and center.  I had broken down I'm not sure how many Seattle Pottery Supply clay boxes into uniformly sized pieces and cut slots so they could be put together like modular tiles.

At the end of day 2 I had about 3 feet of vertical wall built and I packed all the remaining materials inside, hoping that everything would be there the next morning.

Below is a detail shot of the interlocking flat panels.  I liked the texture the smaller key pieces created on the walls.

Inside the structure was a great add for Seattle Pottery Supply.

On Day 3 (the final day) I was pushing  pretty hard to finish the house structure.  Thanks to a couple of friends and their sweet granddaughters helping me cut slots in cardboard, the end was near.

After getting the roof on, the last thing to do was hang all the tiny houses from day 1, inside the big house.

This was quite the process of planning to preparation to production to documentation to finally deconstruction.  Which went extremely fast.  What took me 3 days to build took 15 minutes to break down.  I felt just like the big bad wolf.

Thanks Anchor Art Space for asking me to do a project.  I truly enjoyed the creative experience.