Vacancy

I recently completed a project for the Three Rivers Historical Museum in a partnership with the Mineral King Preservation Society, designed by Emma Christy-Thorne at ETCxDesign Studio. The museum has been improving its exhibit space and this project is intended to highlight the voices of the Native people of our region.

MDF pieces sit on full sheets of MDF, awaiting assembly.

I took this project on as a side job in addition to my full time job, so it required a lot of time and organizational management. It also required a lot of spatial management as I built the entire collection in my garage. Every day spent in the garage meant resetting the shop and then collapsing it back down (as I did not want to take away Carrie’s parking space). Adding complexity, I was running multiple, overlapping processes. For example, the cases that would hold artifacts needed to be painted and allowed to de-gas for a minimum of 14 days, so I divided the project into two phases, building and painting the cases, then setting them aside while I built the plinths and A/V cabinets.

Installation day, panning across pre-painted exhibit cases to the 7m long plinth that supports them.

Last weekend I rented a cargo van, loaded it up with all the pieces and drove 80 miles to put it all together. I couldn’t have been more pleased with the smoothness of the installation and I’m excited to see what objects fill the cases and to see the story unfold.

Two separate plinths (brown) support a variety of artifact cases (sage and sesame) and A/V kiosks (spiced pumpkin).

Contrasting that sense of excitement, there is always a sense of melancholy at the end of project that required so much attention. I worked on this project from June through mid-October, overlapping with trips to Hawaii and Minnesota as well as a weekend stay by a couple of friends. If it wasn’t actively in the foreground of my life, it was always floating in the background, tumbling around in my mind as I considered different ways of achieving the end goal.

And now it’s done and there is a little more space in my life again. There is always a kind of grieving process with these kinds of things. As makers, we live intimately with our creations (in these case, literally in my house). We touch everything over and over, become familiar with the corners and lines of pieces, and grow to both love projects and be frustrated by them at the same time. Then, like that, they’re gone and out of our hands to exist as they were intended.

This time I’m trying to remember to make some space for myself at the end of this project and to be fulfilled by the ultimate purpose of the project: lifting up the voices of people who have been colonized and oppressed and often misrepresented in the historical record.