Creating the Maquette

The Maquette, a small model of how I would like to present my artwork, in an ideal situation. It is a cave/temple symbolic of the womb. My intention is to create an immersive experience and ideally it would also be an interactive, collaboration. The audience would be invited to participate by making their own handprints on the cave walls, inside the full sized installation.

I had already tried making the small replicas of the wooden circles with buttons 1" across. They were far too big, so I tried again with wooden buttons half the size. But first, I prepared them with tiny transfers (sections from the stone circle image I used on the full sized version.

I also applied wax, created holes through the wax so I could roughly sew them to some scrap tissue paper - with a view to positioning them inside the maquette cave and then sewing them neatly in place. Then once they were in a circle I could remove the guiding circle and blue tissue paper. I also planned on waxing over the button holes to hide the fixings, once they were in position and secure. However, they also were much too big!

Here they are, in comparison to some foam circles and tiny 1/8" wooden discs that I had bought. I tested them all out, to see how they held the wax, and they all did. However, the foam would not take the transfers as well as a wooden base and would react badly to the heat gun- so I decided to use the tiny wooden discs. When I worked out the proportions mathamatically, they were perfect in size, but when I judged them 'by eye' they seemed too small. I was concerned they would be too fiddly to work with, but I managed fine with them (using tweezers and some patience)!

Here they were, with the transfers and matte medium in place. Then I removed the top layer of the transfers, applied thinned acrylic paint to the edges, and waxed them in place.

I let some of the image and paint from earlier layers show through the wax, to imitate the full sized discs. I decided I could always add more wax, once they were in place if it was needed. I then considered how best to secure them, and decided to try using some 'glue dots' (made by the company that makes blue tac). These dots turned out to be the perfect size, and nice and strong, they held them securely to the textured 'cave wall'.

Here you can see some of the 'handprints,' which I created by cutting out picutres of hands that I found online and then reduced in size using photoshop. I attached the hands to the walls with a tiny amount of blutac and sprayed layers of thinned acrylic paint over them, using them as stencils. Then once the paint was dry, I removed the tiny paper hands and discovered that they had worked quite well as stencils. It was fiddly working so small, but the result was as I intended. I chose yellow ochre, burned umber and red to decorate the cave and create the cave art. My intention was to reference women and earth goddesses. The red was symbolic of and menstrual blood, with connotations of both fertility and feminism.

When I first made the cave structures I embedded prehistoric symbols into the foundations, these symbols are associated with the Goddess in her life giving aspect. In the picture above you can see the symbolic parallel lines which Gimbutas calls bi-lines, and assocates with the pregnant aspect of the goddess. I chose to make some of these marks with a stick, as I imagine primative artists would have done. I replicated the same symbols on the full sized cave by finger painting. This is another simple, direct way of mark making which is often used in nursery education to encourage young children to express themselves with paint.

Finally the 'circle of circles' were the right size! I liked the contrast with the reddish background and the use of white, red and black on the 'feature wall'. Thse colours in modern paganism symbolize the three aspects of the goddess as maiden, mother and crone.