Three Weeks

Three weeks from today my exhibition will open and I will be ready. I will. No doubt in my mind, despite the nervous little laugh that burbles up involuntarily whenever the incredible soon-ness of 18 November arises in conversation. And these days I have very little ability to initiate conversation on any other topic.

My last few days at the Quarry have been right on track for my tight timetable and today I actually edged ahead, with a productive session of printing lanterns. Last time I made a lantern book I was laser printing from a Word document and the most time consuming aspect of the project was the origami. This time I'm setting and printing one word per lantern on the proofing press, a process that took about two hours to print the first word and the rest of Friday to print the next 30. There are 156 words in Sky in the City. The origami seems insignificant in comparison to the endless monotony of printing... and I figure I can enlist E's expert origami skills if I'm still folding lanterns while we are installing the exhibition. Fortunately I knocked out another sixty or so words onto lanterns today, working until I was so tired and cross-eyed that I started making stupid mistakes.

That's when I cleaned up TKPT and walked across the spring-beautiful Quarry to my little Studio 4 to put in a few hours on Meliors' Scarey Biggest Book Ever. It's called You are Beautiful and it is so ridiculously big that I have to enlist help whenever I want to move one of the wooden pages. I persuaded a friendly stranger (thanks V) to help me shift the first completed page out of the way and put a fresh blank page out to be worked on. (The book is so big and the studio so small that I can only work on one page at a time).

Oh, and in between the lanterns and the Big Book I made a start on the last work for the show by cutting luscious Incisioni 350gsm to make Mobius strips. Due to the lantern printing progressing unexpectedly well I might actually have time to make the Mobius book without sacrificing a day of annual leave or a night of sleep. And perhaps my laughter might be a little less nervous when I flick over the calendar to November and come face to face with the big red circle around Sunday 18th.