I had a wedding anniversary early in 2020. We’d booked a weekend away in some swanky country hotel and kitchen, we;d been looking forward to it for months, it was so posh that you had to book months in advance.
Lockdown meant it was all off, no waffle robes, no tasting menu, nothing.
I’m sure many of us experienced similar disappointments with weddings and birthdays canceled, even funerals and wakes ironically.
One of the only things that made the day special was a gift of two nice bottles of red that my sister-in-law sent…they came in a little wooden box with a handle and sliding lid.
The wine was great and the little box was just too damn cute to throw away.
It sat on the bench for a week, I wanted to fill it with something, I’d decided that during Lockdown I was going to play, it seemed pointless making canvases for closed galleries. I was going to muck about a bit, play with techniques and new material and find ways of showing some of my more popular subjects for canvas in new and novel ways.
Indigo gets up has always struck a chord with people. I’ve always thought that it’s the candid act that she’s caught in that makes it appealing. A small girl in a polka dot dress (my niece, otherwise known as Inky) tagging a masterpiece.
The depth of the box made the contents dark so I came up with the idea of illuminating it somehow…Playing with LED’S I had lying around, I knocked a prototype up, I made a false back to the box with some frosted acrylic sheet, cut a stencil of one of my wallpaper patterns to fit. Put the lights at the back and cut some characters and rudekids out of card and stuck small spacers on the back and assembled them as a little scene inside the box. It looked cute, and I started to shop for components and play around with dolls house fittings and Infrared controllers.
Experiments are fun, there’s no right or wrong, there are plenty of false starts and dead ends but the little shonky prototype, although quite rough and ready showed the idea worked. Puzzles are a good way to take up time, and it was weeks before the final versions were finished and ready to switch on.
These boxes are an open edition and will be launched on the 28th of November and will be available for order between midnight on the 27th and will close midnight of 5th of December. Orders will be made during November and December and be shipped by Christmas. Each box comes with a power supply and infrared controller.