Idle Hands

as part of Put Up Your Dukes! Part Two I wanted to make a text work, in response to Gabrielles text works, so i came up with a great quote from The Modern Art of Flower Arranging by Elisabeth de Lestrieux (1986) (see my post a the time: fa)

the full quote was

An old-fashioned arrangement, in shades of one, or at most two, colours, is living proof that gardens designed around a particular colour are indeed very natural in their effect.

and the idea was to hand cut it out of wood grain wall vinyl – see  An old,  to mimic Gabrielles immaculate text drawing in a lazy manner. unfortunately, while it looked suitably lazy it was really quite time consuming and tedious. i decided to settle for just “An Old fashioned arrangement” utilising the trials I had already done, not minding that they were in different wood grains. but then I looked at the roll of vinyl and went nah, I am not cutting even one more letter.  An old-fashioned did not seem much on its own, but the letters available could be reconfigured into “idle hands” which seemed apt for the situation.

not to be completely dissuaded from my original task I also made a plan B text work using the full quote:

along the way I had found some super-cheap wood grain vinyl which prove so budget it would not even adhere to the wall, but it had a delightfully fake dark wood grain redolent of 70’s panelling. I made it into a wall panel with stencil, as you can see it is pinned and slumps slightly from the wall. It has no punctuation, as the stencil set provided none.

both text works fail gently, but in retrospect I think idle hands fails better through being more obscure, and by eventually falling off the wall itself.