When I started making
daily people in January, I was intrigued by the way limp fabric could become firm simply through wrapping and tying. A few friends to whom I showed the project were surprised to find that the people had no armatures, because they had a lot of structural strength -- that was the whole point of my exploration. But most of the little guys didn't have enough structural strength or balance to stand on their own.
So when I got the opportunity to put them all into an installation, I needed to retrofit some skeletons into practically everybody, extending into a peg that could be fit into a drilled hole on the base.
Some of the people were constructed so I could easily run a support wire up under their skirts or thread it up inside their legs. Others had been wrapped so tightly, and perhaps had some internal folds and creases, that I couldn't force wire through the center of a leg, so I had to snake an external wire up the back of the body, secured by their original wrappings.
That's how I spent my weekend, with wires and wirecutters. I could have saved a lot of time by putting the wire inside in the first place, but would that have been any fun? Heck no!
I'm almost done with the installation -- I'll show it to you soon.
