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Hello friends, I thought it might be helpful to share how I went about hanging the photos for my exhibition, Doris Small: A Retrospective.
As well as being a painter my Gran made soft toys and clothes. I knew I wanted to incorporate this into her exhibition to show the breadth of her creativity but we no longer had any of her originals. That said, we did have the photographs that she herself made of her pieces and I decided to use them. But how best to show them?
There are many and various ways to exhibit photographs. I could have printed them large and foam mounted them for display (something I did for the exhibitions of my own photography years ago). I could also have framed them and displayed them alongside the paintings.
But because they were different kinds of creations I wanted to display them differently. I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted, but I knew it wasn’t going to be a standard gallery sort of way of displaying photos.
So I did what most of us do when looking for ideas and had a hunt around Pinterest… While I was there I stumbled across this image:
I loved the homely, nostalgic feel it had and knew I wanted to do something similar. While this is beautiful and fitting for the kinds of photos in the image above, I didn’t think a rose would be the optimal thing to support the photography of my gran’s work. And similarly I didn’t think twine would be quite the right fit either. I wanted something that felt connected to the subject matter.
And then a few days later, while I was doing some chores, the idea struck me to use knitting needles and wool. My Dad and I both have memories of my Gran’s needles making their soft clacking all evening long. She also taught both of us how to knit. It fitted perfectly.
I didn’t use her original photos as I didn’t want to damage them by mounting and dismounting them, so I made copies.I didn’t do any colour treatment or restoration either as I wanted to keep the vintage, aged feel of them.
Then, to give them enough rigidity to hang nicely, I mounted all the photos on cardboard.
In the exhibition space I cut lengths of wool, doubled them over to give the wool extra strength, and laid them on the floor. Over the top of them I arranged the photos and exhibition labels, moving things around until they looked just right to me.
Once I was happy, I stuck each photo and label to the wool. It took a bit of experimenting by myself, my hubby, and my kiddo looking at different ways of attaching the photo to the wool, but in the end what worked best was probably the simplest solution – a bit of sellotape.
We balanced the wool on the knitting needles – two strands per needle – then tried them at various heights until we found the one we liked the best.
Once we decided that, we threaded the knitting needles through the hanging chains that the gallery space has, and then used copious amounts of Bluetac to make sure they stayed put.
Then we looped the strands of wool back over the knitting needles and quickly stuck them in place with even more Bluetac (I swear, they did not sponsor this post. But if they would like to… 😉 ).
And that was how I went about hanging the photos for my Gran’s exhibition. Several people commented, both in person to me, and in the visitor’s book about how evocative the photo collection was, so it seemed to land the way I had intended.
And yes, the little kid in those pictures (if you zoom in) is me.
Exhibition Blog series:
