John Inglis was a well respected man in the horse racing industry, he liked pigeons, poppies and horses. I had never heard of him before last Friday when a call came from the Director of the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre telling me that this person had passed away and the family wanted to put a mini exhibition together for his Wake. We had five days to do it. My role was to design the exhibtion panels that accompany all the photos and objects in this exhibition as well as setting the colour scheme. Here’s a short run down of a whirlwind 5 days.

Images here

Friday.
The call comes in from Kon late in the afternoon.

Saturday.
We go to the Inglis family home, compound would be a better word, as its massive, the whole street is basically theirs. Surrouned by horse stables and manicured lawns and hedges. They show us everything from old photos to trophies and a hand embroidered table clothe with a who’s who’s of famous people who have had dinner at the Inglis home. The exhibition/Wake will be held in the old NewMarket heritage listed stables toawrds the back of the Inglis home.

Sunday.
Mock up some test designs and colours

Monday.
Spent the day going back and forth finalising the panel designs and text with the family, writer and Kon. I decide to use John Inglis’s three favourite things as graphic symbols on the panels.

Tuesday.
Finalised design. The panels are A4 in size. Got them printed up at Office Works and dropped by the framers to pick up foamcore and spray adhesive. Spent the night with Haline mounting the prints onto foamcore and touching up the edges of the foamcore with thin 5mm paper strips so that the raw foam edge don’t show.

Wednesday.
Met up with the Casula Powerhouse team back at the Inglis stables around 8pm and we start work to assemble and hang all the pieces of memorabilia and photos, setting up the sound installation and video projections. We finished everything by 3am.

The only dissapointing thing out of all this is that it will only be up for one day during the Wake. It was totally worth doing though, the response from the family to this beautiful display was heartfelt.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 27th, 2006 at 11:35 pm and is filed under Happenings, Imagery.