Mont-Dore No. 4 - It's starting to look like something

Times flies…

Tuesday evening.

Spent a very rainy Sunday and Monday cutting the six colors of cord into one meter lengths and then knotting them together into 6 meter lengths.  I made 40 of these composite cords, each with 5 knots… plus I also did 40 with 50 centimeter lengths of each color (for the center support line).  Which makes for a total of 800 knots.  My hands fingers are blistered.

bobins and 1 meter sections of cord

cool kitsch teapot at the apartment and some local wild flowers

 I also painted more of the giant man red.  His two arms are now all painted.  Plus I painted the mini-vortex man who will be part of the maquette that I will install tomorrow in the Musée d’art Roger Quilliot in Clermont-Ferrand. 

eDline headed back to Montpelier in the car late afternoon on Sunday after joining together all the parts of the hips and thighs of giant man.  There are just six parts now : torso, two arms, two calves + feet and the hips/thighs.  She'll be back tomorrow.

calf and foot reunited

two arms sharing a bed

Once it is all painted it will be the last thing added to the installation after the suspension cords are in place.  I started doing that today and will probably finish on Thursday.  After all the time it takes to get the structure in place, this part seems to go pretty quickly.  The only thing that might slow us down is that rain in planned for Thursday.  Will probably have to go out and work in the rain, otherwise we will get behind.

At 2pm this afternoon I was interviewed by Radio France Auvergne.  The interview will be broadcast on Saturday 16 June.  It was fun.  

start of the day - doesn't look like much

Spent the day adding the rainbow cords to the installation.  One line goes down along the back and two others go along the sides and make wing-like shapes on either side.  In the photos you can see the armature that I connect my strings to.  Vortex man will be attached to this structure from underneath.

 

Mont-Dore No. 3 2D photos from the 3D camera

These are the 2D photos of the 3D images taken in the last couple of days.  (blogger isn't confirgured for 3D, so I'll have to up-load the dramatic real ones once I get home).  These might give you an idea

above the falls looking toward them

looking over the edge (this is, of course, much more dramatic in 3D)

harnassed-up and ready to throw the package of string and ballast over the edge

some near-by nature

Mont-Dore No. 2 Vortex installation continues

Mont Dore Blog 2 

adding the attachment and pulley for the main line

It’s Sunday morning.   Yesterday was an all day, long day, big day and I simply didn’t have the energy at the end of it to write, let alone get in the car and drive to the village center to pick-up a wifi connection.

eDline doing mico-reconstruction surgery - reattaching the foot to the calf

Yesterday, eDline worked on assembling the body parts that were in smaller sections so that they could be transported in the car… So, now there are complete legs with feet, etc…  She worked at the house and we went back up to the falls together in the afternoon/evening.

eDline carrying the top half of the frame - It wouldn't fit in the car

adding the attachment and pulley for the main line

the frame

After Friday, there was the main orange cord installed, attached to a white rope, that with a pulley could be raised and lowered.  The idea of the installation is conceived in two steps.  One, where with pulleys at each rope, the whole thing can be lowered so that it can be worked on from the ground and then raised at the end of the day to keep it out of reach.  Second, once it’s done, most of the pulleys will be removed and permanent attachments will be made in their place to make the whole thing more secure.

So, yesterday, I added a rope to the main line, starting at it’s highest end near the falls.  This new rope formed a V, with the original rope in the middle.  Like a three prong grass rake.

That meant installing a new pulley for the central line on the “central” tree and realigning the lift/descend rope with this new attachment, so that the pulley at the top would work better and the angle of pulling on the rope would be more in line with the first rope.  That meant I had to install attachments for the left and right cords.  The right one required a ladder up a big pin tree.  The left one meant climbing the branches of a deciduous tree (which I ended-up doing six times during the day… really a great climbing tree, with lots of rungs.  I got to know each of the branches and how to climb it quickly, by the time I had done it six times. 

A purple rope was installed across the opening of the big V to make a more or less equal triangle floating in the air. 

view from the falls back toward the installation with the structure lowered so that we can add the frame (which is leaning against the rock in the center of the bottom of the pic).

When eDline came back with me after lunch, she finished the frame that she had started in the morning, the frame that I will attach my cords to and which when I’m done, her  5m (15ft) wire man will be attached to, hung from underneath.  It is designed to follow the form of the sculpture, so my cords can be attached to it rather than to the sculpture, which is rather delicate.

We then lowered the whole frame down to where we could get to it from the ground and attached the framework and then lifted it all up.  The effect was pretty impressive and even though we were exhausted, the sight of it gave us an adrenaline rush.  You could imagine from the “sketch” what the final piece would look like.  The frame gave an impression of a graffiti stick figure or an ancient indian drawing of a man on a cliff wall.  The final figure will certainly be more impressive, but the little stick man of the frame had its own charm.  (sorry, forgot to take a picure)

We then had to shorten the attachment lines for the frame to raise it up, so that it would be out of reach of passers-by.  We plan not to go back to the falls until tomorrow as not only was a big rainstorm predicted for today, but it is, in deed, raining steadily.  So, today, I will assemble all the cords that will go from the orange triangle to the frame.  They will be made of six different colored cord, so each one will have to be cut and knotted.  Probably will take me all day.

eDline is going back to the south today to see and to bring her daughter back with her.  She wont be back until Wednesday, so, I will finish the assembly of the cords and then attach them tomorrow if the weather holds.  Tuesday is an extra day in case it takes longer than the estimated one day to install the ropes.    Wednesday I will install the maquette at the Museum, and eDling will pick me up from there on her way back.

So, Thursday, if the figure is all painted red, and there is still lots and lots to paint, we will attach Vortex Man to the frame now suspended by hundreds of colored cords and give start doing final adjustments.  

PS. On the way home, I found a 4 leaf clover, not the first I've ever seen, but the first I ever found myself :)

 

Mont-Dore No. 1

There always has to be a first day…  

Arrived in Clermont-Ferrand yesterday.  Took the 7am train from Paris, which meant that I got up at 5 am… which wasn’t the easiest thing in the world as, go figure, I came down with a super bad cold on Tuesday and felt like $#it on Wednesday.  So had to do packing and last minute prep while not in very good shape… And the night I spent with chills and waking up every fifteen minutes… Why is Murphy’s Law always so reliable and inevitable?  

I had a HUGE suitcase filled with all the cords for the project, so I took a taxi.  Slept all the way on the train.  Went directly from the train station to the Roger Quilliot Art Museum (musée d’art Roger-Quilliot), where Nathalie Roux, the director, met me and we discussed the installation I will be doing there next week. 

I had a chance to walk around the old city center, which is perfectly charming and as many uncountable times that I’ve been to Clermont-Ferrand on the train, I have never seen it.  Well worth another longer visit.

Edline (BIANCO, the artist with whom I am doing the installation), who arrived in Mont-Dore on Weds evening, drove over and we did some supply shopping including groceries and then headed to the little house we rented.  I made a stew, so we would have something to eat for a few days, without having to prepare meals every night.  We walked up to the falls where we will be installing, to see it again and get the mental process going.

Here are photos of the house and various parts of Vortex Man that awaited me on my arrival :

what greeted me when I arrived in my room

view from my bedroom window

 vortex man's torso

 

 We had a little session of painting in the dining room... paintingVortex Man red :

Then we drove around town getting bearings for a wifi signal, so that I can start blogging.

A good night’s sleep and we went at it full force this morning, which meant having to climb up to the top of the falls (probably about 100 feet high) (okay, there is a road leading up the back way, we didn’t have to climb up the cliff.

 

At the top (and the 3D photos show the precipice better than the 2D ones), we installed a pulley tied around a tree and threw 20 metters (65ft) of cord over the edge.  Yes, I made a harness from my cords and tied myself to a tree, so there was no chance of me following the package of cord and half-filled milked bottles we used for weight.

So, we headed back down to recover the end of the line only to discover that we had sent only enough line over to not even reach half-way down the cliff.  Ugh!  Pourtant, the tourist office had told us that the falls were listed as being about 35 feet (10m) high…  We were a bit doubtful at the time and estimated it to be about the 20m we had planned for with out rope.  Turns out it something much more like 30m (100ft).

So, that was a good time to stop to have lunch.  It was already 14h.  So a quick ham sandwich with some local Cantal cheese and a couple errands in town, including getting the Tourist Office to print us a DANGER sign to put on the ropes at the top of the cliff to discourage people from climbing on them or using them to approach the edge.  They weren’t designed for human weight.

 

Then we went back up in the afternoon, pulled the first attempt back up… doubled the amount of rope, retied a harness around me and through the weighted ends of the rope back over the edge.  Felt good, because on tugging the cord, it felt slack.  Without being able to see the bottom of the falls, we assumed that it had hit bottom.  Luckily, when we got there our sack of string ends, bobbins, and ballast, was floating in the little pool just to the left side of where the cascade was hammering down.  So, I rocked jumped across the stream, which wasn’t the easiest thing to do as some of the rocks were slick as snot and you couldn’t tells which ones were until you stepped on them.  My left foot went in pretty early in the adventure and my right one went in just before coming back.  Luckily, I was wearing water resistant hiking boots, so my socks didn’t even get damp.  Once on the other side, I used a long stick to fish a part of the string out from under mists and showering down water.  Then just rocked jumped my way back to the other shore, not having suffered any serious damage.

We then used one of the ladders that the city provided to attach a line and another pulley on one big tree up on the right side of the falls and then I just climbed up a tree on the left side and did the same.  At almost 47 years of age, I felt just like I did when I was 10 and climbed a tree.  How liberating.  How fun.

By that time it was nearly 20h, so we went back to the house and I prepared the photos and am writing the text, so that later we can go to the hotspot and blog.

Now it’s time for dinner of stew and a great red wine (Cairanne) that was good last night and even better tonight.

Vidéo - Vortex Man

Here's a video that Edline just put on line of 5 meter Vortex Man, which will be part of our collaborative installation at Horizons - Rencontres "Arts Natures" this summer.  Check it out.

Voilà le vidéo de Vortex Man (5m) qu'Edline vient de mettre en ligne.  Il sera la partie principale de notre installation collaborative à Horizons - Rencontres "Art Natures" cet été.

Site - Vortex - Horizons - Rencontre "Arts Natures"

Edline et moi devant la chute où on installerait "Vortex" en juin

Edline and me infront of the waterfall, where we will install "Vortex" in June.

Communité de Mont-Dore.

What we were looking at : 

Ce qu'on était en train de regarder :

Cascade du Queureuilh

Mont Dore, France

Horizons - Rencontres "Arts Natures"