Before we can start to install our pieces of work, we had to prepare our spaces. My wall was not particularly challenging to prep, but there were a lot of holes that I had to fill, and the painting was probably the most physically demanding part of the process. It was interesting how throughout the wall prep process I became a lead figurehead where people would ask me where things were, or what to do and so on. I did work alongside Charlotte as her wall was opposite mine, and because her wall was quite long, and needed the extra person to help paint it.
As well as focusing on my own wall, I helped Charlotte with her wall as well. Her wall was longer than mine and slightly taller so it needed two people to work on it. I showed her how to use Gum Tape and helped her sand down her wall. Like most people in the other spaces, we did have a lot of issues with the Gum tape. Even on my wall, I had some of the existing Gum tape start to peel away. We decided to see if paint would work and have it dry down and hold, but it didn't work on my wall when I tried it, so we had to think of something else. I then tried filler and pasted a thick layer of filler over the pieces of Gum tape that was peeling away, this seemed to work well on my wall, and initially started to work on Charlotte's wall, but eventually I could see the tape peeling away again.
Once we painted the second coat of paint on Charlotte's wall we waited for it to dry, and decided to use glue and glue down the parts that needed glueing. Hopefully this works, but I think the changing temperature of the corridor doesn't allow the Gum tape to dry down properly causing it to come unstuck more easily, but it was a good learning process for potentially future exhibition prep that I may take part in.
There were some walls further down in our space that weren't touched much, that needed a coat of paint on, which frustrated me as we had to focus on our own walls and weren't expected to work on others walls. This seemed to be a recurring problem in the other spaces where not a lot of people would be turning up to start prep on their walls. I always believe that if you start early it gives you plenty of time to prep as the filler takes roughly 24 hours to fully dry, and the Gum tape takes 5-6 hours to dry, so leaving it last minute is not really a good idea. It did prompt to let people know in the year group chat that we had until end of day Thursday to get our spaces ready to remind people of the short amount of time we have to get everywhere ready and primed for next weeks install.
The painting process was quite easy, however the Gum tape on Charlotte's wall needed quite a few coats of paint to fully cover. Once the walls had at least one coat of paint on them they were starting to look really clean and ready for artwork. I did clean the edges of the floor ready for cutting in with the floor paint, and painted a little further out than was expected but wanted to be sure that my wall space looked as pristine as possible. I did get little bits of floor paint on the bottom of the wall which a small brush with some white paint fixed quite easily.
Overall, it was a very easy process of sanding, filling, sanding and then painting with a few more issues with Charlotte's wall. It's all good experience and I was glad that all that I've learnt from previous exhibition set ups have helped me to get my wall to a great show standard. The next challenge now is to figure out how to hang my pieces and to start to curate the works in the spaces. Me and Charlotte have agreed to work together as we know that our works being opposite each other will most likely have some sort of impact on each other, especially because Charlotte plans to show a film and needs less light than I do, so there are things we need to discuss and work out next week.