Exhibiting: Defenceless

Hanging the exhibition

Having worked together professionally for over twelve years in one guise or another, there was nothing unusual about the prospect of putting up our images on the same wall.

It was never formally spoken of, but at no point did we feel the need to identify who had taken which photographs - they were all un-credited in a truly joint venture.

We arrived at the gallery in two vehicles, loaded to the gunwales with interestingly-shaped brown paper parcels, boxes of tools and, erm, lots of sand.

We were well-prepared, and knew exactly what we wanted to hang where. Even so, there were some differences in expectations and the atmosphere became a little tense at times - very unusually for us. We agreed at one point that we felt we weren't working well together that day. However, we were assisted at the venue by one of the gallery collective members, and she commented on how WELL she thought we worked together - so our professionalism saved the day, it seems!

Once we had decided to abandon the invisible thread and go for the Perlon, we made good progress. The uneven nature of the wall proved difficult, but nothing was insurmountable and the discreet use of Blu-tack sometimes offered us the solution we needed to keep things straight.

The sand? Oh, that was for the beach... we had collected objects from Happisburgh which we felt represented the loss and destruction to be found there: sea-worn bricks from people's houses which had long since fallen into the sea, rusty ironwork from the crumbling defences, a child's sock found wedged in the cliff.. but we didn't take the sand, that would have just added to the erosion! Instead we used playsand from a local toyshop:

click to enlarge

Once we had finished, some six hours later, the exhibition looked quite impressive and we left with hopes high for a successful show.