Work in progress on the waterfall collage to be enlarged for level three of the stairwell.
View of the level three collage underway, a rocky scene with a waterfall. I've painted the edges of the cradled wood panels black so that some of my papers will wrap around the edge and expose a bit about the way the collage was assembled. And yes, I work with gallon-sized quantities of glue :)
Aerial view of the studio: the calm before the storm! Wood panels and drawings ready to begin.
Here I'm working mostly on the "above treeline" collage but sifting colors into piles for potential use in other pieces.
Collage work in progress… the usual paper mayhem ensues!
So I set to work. I had done very simple sketches of how the landing imagery would flow upward through the space. As you climbed the stairs, different views would present themselves. Beginning with level one, walking along a stream with broad views into the distance, level two at the edge of a forest, level three passing a waterfall, level four above treeline, and level five depicting the last few boulders at the peak with views of the sky and distant landforms.
Each collage would be composed of many pieces of paper ripped from magazines and repurposed to make new landscapes from my imagination. The studio quickly became filled with piles of sifted materials! These were more detailed and more realistic than any collages I've made in the past… they needed to be wildly interesting at nine times their original size so there was a constant concern about how they would translate once enlarged.
IMA building exterior under construction, September 2014.
View of new transit center from building, looking northwest.
One really great aspect of the stairwell project is the location of the building, adjacent to Denver's Union Station transit redevelopment area. I'm both excited and nervous about this project! It's a bit of a leap… working small and thinking big!
Level five, the tallest space, with standpipe somewhat obscured by our guide
Level two standpipe looks particularly awkward to work around.
The stairwell project was approved by the client and my first visit to the site was exciting, but also a little worrisome. On the stairwell plans, we'd identified a standpipe (for firefighting purposes) running vertically through the space... however it looked a lot more innocuous on paper than it did in real life! Here are some photos of the rough space under construction in mid-September. It was obvious that the artwork, once installed, needed to somehow overwhelm the standpipe rather than the other way around!
Hilary discovers a box inexplicably mounted to center of level one wall, later relocated!