I had a mental block for quite some time on what material to use for my
Life Stories project when it came to the flooring of my 3d set-up, which is designed to look like a dance hall. Originally in my early designs I had taken for granted that the flooring would be easy, and it would just be a fairly straightforward representation of a wooden/ parquet floor. When it actually came to the point where I needed to construct it I was unsure how to approach it. I thought about a few options: I could have photographed parquet flooring and then used a repeated image of this to create a realistic floor (which would have been fiddly, time consuming and potentially not fit in very tastefully; I could have continued the technique I used for the dancing figures and transfer a pencil drawing of parquet flooring (but that would also be very time consuming and might look monotonous); or I could have placed pieces of real wood in it.
Finally I made the decision to make it more surreal, and create a floor that looks like a garden, to include an element of landscape gardening that is also very important to the history behind this piece. I've since been knitting different textured samples to then sew together for this. It's been taking up a LOT of my spare time for the past few days, and frustratingly slow work.
Molly, my cat, was not being particularly helpful earlier today...
