Project Facade: News

Don’t you just love the way things sometimes fall into place?

You just know that any ‘serious’ book on the techniques of plastic surgery that has a chapter title ‘Flap Happy’ and ‘Ear Making’ is going to be a little unusual and not quite what you would expect of a medical text. Let me introduce to you the two volume set ‘The Art and Principles of Plastic Surgery’, Gillies seminal text on plastic surgery which has become available to the project for me to consult. 

So yesterday (8/3/05) I hopped on a train at Waterloo for my first meeting with the chaps at Sabre Sales, suppliers of everything military (surplus that is!). I was put onto Sabre Sale by Gill Brewer, Curator of Uniforms at the National Army Museum Chelsea who suggested that rather than try to make the sculptures I’m producing from scratch, why not try to source original First World War uniforms to cut up and alter. My thinking was that a) I would struggle to get hold of these uniforms in the quantities I would need and b) it would be frowned upon if I did cut them up. Some people saying I might be accused of ‘hacking up history’. Gill assured me that many such uniforms were in very poor condition and survived in quite good quantities and if I couldn’t find uniforms specific to individual regiments, some Second World War uniforms differed only slightly from those worn during WW1.

I’m going to begin with a confession. Not a bad confession, but a confession all the same. In an ideal world, I’d like to be able to say that everything I make is built around meticulous planning and research that subsequently shapes the things I make. I’d like to think this is true the majority of the time and I know that people who know me and read this know how obsessive I get when it comes to making work. However, coincidence and ‘the happy accident’ does play a part in the work I end up making and the form it takes so I’m not going to pretend otherwise. This is the case with the face scaffolds.

You join us 4 months into Project Façade, and quite a lot has happened in those 4 short months. First though, let me tell you how the project started.