On the first day we were allowed to set up, me and Gorgi were on site first at 10:00, and picked up the keys to the gallery from the Thames-Side Studios office. Most of the students were meeting at the AVA building at UEL at 11:00 to load the van, but me and Gorgi had ordered materials from merchants yard Travis Perkins to be delivered directly to the gallery and had been told it could come as early as 10:00. The first couple of hours were waiting, so we looked around the space and the surrounding areas and I took a few photos of the space.
Once the other students in the van arrived we began placing works against walls and preparing for the hang.
Eventually after multiple phone calls Travis Perkins finally turned up (4 hours late) and after a quick discussion with the driver we realised they didn't have the timber I ordered on the truck, only Gorgi's breeze blocks. Not only that but they had squeezed another customers order of stacked plaster board so close to the blocks that the crane arm on the truck couldn't fit round the blocks to lift them off the truck, the driver saying he assumed we would have a forklift, despite Gorgi saying on the phone specifically that he wouldn't. The driver said he couldn't get them off the truck and he would have to just report it as a failed delivery and take it back to the warehouse and they would try another day, Gorgi worried that he now didn't have a piece for the show. We suggested we get on the truck and just take the plastic wrap off, and pass the blocks one by one off the truck, but the driver pointed at a sign on the side saying: "NO UNAUTHORISED PERSONNEL ON BOARD". Luckily the driver said he knew the site manager for the entire Thames-Side Studios area and said he would try and have a word with him. The site manager offered to use his forklift to get Gorgi's blocks off the lorry for £50 cash, which Gorgi said he didn't have, the site manager then said (possibly joking, albeit with a very straight face) "look at their faces" then disappeared. Amazingly he came back on his forklift and forked the pallet of blocks off the truck and dropped it into the gallery entrance and then drove off again before we could say thank you.
This is when me and a bunch of our fellow students helped gorgi carry the blocks into the gallery space, he later got help again in arranging them in the way he wanted.
We continued to hang works with the help of Lee. As my timber wasn't on the truck, I was still waiting to stretch my big painting, as I had decided a few days before that I would stretch it on site, as it was too big to transport not rolled up, in the meantime I stapled the canvas to the wall as a placeholder and hung my smaller painting, securing my spot. I also helped multiple other students hang their work.
After another few phone calls I managed to convince Travis Perkins to send out my timber again and a man in a people carrier turned up at the gallery at around 17:00, 7 hours late. I was then able to get to work cutting the timber down to length and cutting lap-joints into the ends, then screwing it all together to make a stretcher. I then stretched the rolled up canvas onto it and stapled it.
I learned during this that it is not a good idea to build the stretcher on site, despite a couple of people suggesting it, because if you are only armed with a saw and a drill, you can't cut the best joints, and ordering timber instead of picking it up yourself from the yard means you can get given warped pieces, making the stretcher not completely straight, as I realised once hanging it on the wall. The bottom right hand corner stuck out a bit, and the left edge looked wonky in comparison to the straight painting on the left. At this point it was too late to do anything about it however and had to hang it.
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