Put the horse in the cart and let’s go
October 7th, 2009
Carole Choucair Oueijan, Layaleena, 48 x 72, smalti, 24 karat gold smalti, granite, marble, onyx, crystallino, mother of pearl, fresh-water pearl, hematite, coral, jade, quartz
I always crate artworks from the inside-out; at least in my bean, in the design stage. But the actual building can vary. Sometimes it can proceed in any order, and sometimes the crate must be built before the art is approached. It depends on whether the artwork is packaged in soft materials separate from the crate, or whether it must be built directly into the crate with a cushioned wood structure. When it’s the former, I occasionally prefer to pack the art before the crate is started. This is hardly necessary, but it can save a little desk time when dealing with a number of irregular shapes that aren’t so irregular that they require much planning ahead.
This was one of those jobs that fell into that little gray area. It just made more sense to figure out how large the package would be by packing it. The piece was composed of twenty-odd irregular sections of mosaic of variable thickness. It would happily ride flat in a stack of foam-welled trays. With such a simple packing approach, it was more efficient to sort the elements by relative size and shape in “real time,” as it was being loaded onto trays. I started with a rough guideline of 36″ x 24″ trays, and from that starting point my crater found that he could fit all elements onto 13 trays at 32″ x 24″. I’m starting to make it sound more complicated than it was. Before I knew it, the trays were packed and I had a nice boxy package to measure for the crate.
Our thanks to Carole Choucair Oueijan for her permission to include images of her artwork. Layaleena, an Arabic/Lebanese word for “Splendor Nights”, is a commission piece installed in a home in Greece. In this scene the goal was to reflect the magnificence of the Lebanese nights and lifestyle of the past. Layaleena is made out of 21 pieces and took 10 months to complete.
-Chris
Tags: art shipping, artwork, commission piece, coral, crate, crate dims, Crating, depth, Design, granite, irregular shapes, jade, marble, mosaic, onyx, Packing, quartz, relative size, trays
October 8th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Imagine my delight to open my RSS reader today to find a friend’s artwork as the subject of your blog post. How wonderful is that?!! Have shared the link to this post with some others in the mosaic art world, who will also enjoy seeing Carole’s work packed with such TLC.