It takes 6 hours.

This video is about 2 1/2 hours condensed down into 34 seconds. That’s me installing just one of the pieces for my first solo exhibition, which opened on Thursday last week. I thought it would be fun to try and capture a little about what installation is like because I don’t think artists often talk about that part. I filmed this on my iPad, which was set up on a windowsill across the room.

The piece is called Well Dressed and there are 144 origami dresses hung on tiny clothespins from bakers twine.

I had sorted them ahead of time by style. If you look closely at the photo, there are about 7 different dress styles and I wanted to make sure they were fairly evenly distributed among the “laundry lines”. I chose colors and patterns to be next to one another as I went along. The patterns on each dress were created by students in the workshops I did as part of this grant project. I printed their designs on wrapping paper in 6 inch squares. Then I did a lot of practice folding. I searched for origami dress tutorials on YouTube and Pinterest and because my paper was much thicker than traditional origami paper, I needed to fold and tweak the designs to work with the heavy paper.

I installed this piece first because I knew it would take the most time. Actually after I finished the time lapse video, I went back and added one more laundry line row so I could spread out the dresses a little more because I felt like they were too crowded.

In addition to this wall, there were 8 other pieces, a section of photos and “the making of” original art, plus 2 interactive sections. The rest of those were relatively fast to install.

Most of my dress forms have to be creatively padded to make things fit just right. I always make pieces that fit me, but I am not as tiny as the dress forms are. Quilt batting, bubble wrap and pins are my friend. I forgot to take a photo of the “before”, but this lady is wearing two layers of quilt batting and a bra with some extra padding so she looks like this dress fits her. The arms on these dress forms help a lot to make things hang right.

You can see from the photos that the gallery I installed everything in is an old house. I thought formal gallery labels would look kind of out of place in that kind of a setting, so I made all of my labels look like framed pieces and used vector drawings of big ornate frames to put them in. I printed those on peel and stick wallpaper and cut out the outside edge of the frame before I hung them up.

144 paper dresses, 288 clothespins, 84 feet of string, 3 dozen velcro hangers, 8 dress forms, 12 trips up and down 2 flights of stairs, 14 feet of wallpaper, 20 yards of fabric, 6 hours to install.