Chuffed

Feeling quite chuffed. An outdoor exhibition project that I was working on at the Gardens has now been installed! It's called Writing home from the Gardens, and is a celebration of 150 years of the Christchurch Botanic Gardens. The task was to choose ten sites representing various events or places from the last 150 of the Gardens, to make a followable trail, with a fictional family writing their experiences of the sites. So we start at 1863 and the planting of the first tree, to celebrate the marriage of the Prince of Wales, and end at the Peace Bell with the 2011 memorial ceremony for the victims of the earthquake. I invented the family (the Pauls) and their backstory, then wrote letters/postcards/texts from the family members. The context for each missive was given, images chosen and then the designers put it all together as storyboards, with an accompanying booklet that tells the story of the family. We even used some of my artwork for a fictional rose catalogue, and it looks great, just like a real artist did it! It's strange to see something that existed for so long in my head now out there in the world. Hopefully the public will enjoy it, I certainly enjoyed making it up and doing the research. I can't post pictures because the images are copyright and once they get on the 'net who knows what can happen to them, but if you're in Christchurch they are out in the Gardens now. You can 'do' them as a trail or just happen upon single boards, they read OK as either.