Install- Finishing touches

The Finishing touches...

Our vinyl motif is put up.

Labels and panels go up

Rachel, Vicky and Shuang make tassels for our "smell" boxes

The press launch starts at 5.00 and at 4.45 we finish, just time to sweep up.

Install week two- The Manchu Warrior and Dragon Robe

Two of our pieces need special cases built for them.

A large dragon robe is to be hung from the celling and displayed between two sheets of perspex and the Manchu Warrior's amour is having a large case which is to be built on-site.

Metal wire's are attached to the Galleries celling to suspend the robe from...

The robe is then anchored to the floor.

The Manchu Warrior's case takes about 6 people to put it together.

Install week two- The pieces go in.

Victoria Hobbs (conservation officer) helps us get the pieces ready. Each box is cleaned and then the 3-d objects are carefully put in and carried over to the wall to be attached by John, our technician for the week.

Most of the flat objects are mounted onto fabric and board. We attach them to the wall with velcro and then cover them with their perspex case.

Install Week two- the layout

At the start of week two, all the pieces for display are bought up from storage in Brewhouse yard to the Castle.

Jenna and I have unwrapped all the perspex cases and started marking out on the wall where everything will go. We do a dry run where all the boxes are screwed into the wall so we can see how they all look and so we can move anything that isn't working before we start to put the pieces in. We also need to figure out where to put the interpretation panels and objects labels.

By the end of the day things are taking shape, we've only moved a couple of boxes and we are ready to start putting in the pieces from the collection...

Install Day Two

Day Two...

Painting the Mural

and the teal wall

Install Day one

Taken on my phone so sorry for slightly grainy quality!
The start of the mural and preparing the back wall for painting.

Exhibition Lanterns

Part of our Exhibition design is to have clusters of white or cream lanterns hanging from the celling in the Gallery. Rachel and Shuang told us that white lanterns were associated with funerals in China so we thought we should go for cream ones and then paint them with the colours and motifs from the exhibition.

Cafe Tables

Only a couple of weeks to go now so we are getting on with smaller jobs whilst we wait for printers to print the marketing and the technicians to build our cases. Next week is install week, we'll be painting our teal wall and mural and then the week after everything goes in to the gallery ready for our launch on the 29th March.

The Castle Museum has 6 display cases in the Museum Cafe which also double up as tables. We asked if we could use them to display some of the props and puppets that we created for our animation " The Dragon and the Heavenly Peach" which will be showing as part of the exhibition.

Here are the displays we came up with...

Exhibition Motifs

Last wednesday the Exhibition team and the Interpretation team went up to Nottingham Castle to look at our plans in the exhibition space. Ian had taken our motif idea and worked it into a vynl. There was a moment of baited breath as we watched him peel off the paper cover and show us the motif against the gallery wall.

We all really liked it and the scale of the design. We decided that we wanted the motif to weave around the room, at places to stay thin and in others to build into clusters. We decided to experiment with the motif by tracing and cutting out sections of it and seeing how well we could build it up.

Next we needed to decide where it would run around the room.

We all drew our ideas and most of us placed the motif at the top of the space with the clusters in the corners. Rachel and Onaissa had put sections of the motif at the bottom of the wall and used it to frame some of the bigger pieces. We really liked the way this looked and so agreed on a combination of the two.
We thought about running the motif all the way round the room but when we tried it against the teal paint (that we are using on the back wall) it didn't look right. So we are going to keep the motif to just the white walls.

The motif will wind around these two walls...

but will peeter out when it reaches the teal wall.

I'll add the finished design here once I've drawn it up!

Exhibitions- Decision Time

Yesterday's session was a day of making decisions, the first day of February and we needed to finalise design ideas. We'd spent the last few weeks working out motifs and meeting with Gallery staff to get feedback on what might work and what was possible.

Ian Robinson who will be making our vinyls came in yesterday to look over our plans and help us with our final decisions. We actually made them all in record time.

The decisions made were...

To hand paint a mural based on a section of the below Robe, as in jacqui's designs from previous sessions. The colour of the pattern would be altered slightly so the tones match the colour scheme in the rest of the room. This would spill over into a Vinyl welcome panel.

We wanted a subtle design, a bit like a water mark to run around the edge of the exhibition space. We looked at the robe and found a detail that we thought would work.

We also picked out a couple of paint samples for the walls which we will buy and test out in the space.
All in all a very productive session. The next step is to take all our plans up into the Gallery again and check they all work together.