If you know what we took to Australia and why, you can skip this part. Honestly you can. Skip ahead to part two where I tell you about the Pool Pervert and Shark training.
Or if you really want to hear the whole story then let’s start at the very beginning, as a young Julie Andrews said. And so it begins…my feelings of utter inadequacy when I even start to try to explain to you about Australia, and why we are going there in the first place.
If this was a musical, I’d be launching into a song that said we are “flying out on the wings of a dream”. It would start simply with one lone voice and build to a lavish dance number with full choir where Andre and I end up being hoisted into the air on wires or atop of some big shitty prop swan or at the very least a pink cloud. But I’m not in a musical, this is my real life, though the lyrics of that cheesy musical are really the simplest and most honest way to describe why and how we are going the other side of the world.
It did start with a dream. Andre’s dream. Actually, no…it started with his mother dying, although that doesn’t have the same poetic ring to it as talking of artistic hopes and visions. In that really shitty upon shit year, my darling man – in his efforts to distract himself from grief – conjured up an artistic vision of a sculpture that would honour both the fragility and the incredible strength of women in one single image. And thus, the first beautiful designs of ‘Icarus had a Sister’ came into being.
The creation of this sculpture would end up taking nine long years to complete together, or fifteen if you take into account the parts we remade this year for reasons I will explain later…when I get around to it.
The reasons why this sculpture took so blooming long to finish, and how it was finished and why it was finished are enough to fill a book by themselves. And I should know, because when it was finished, I wrote a book about it. So to sum up a very long story in very quick pace so you’re all caught up:-
- When Andre first designed the sculpture, the technology didn’t yet exist to create the wings as he had envisioned them.
- When the technology finally did exist, we neither knew how to use it, nor could afford to use it.
- When we decided to go for it anyway (Andre dragging me reluctantly into the 21st century) The Fates/The Universe/The Baby Jesus/the angels/whatever deity artists should be sacrificing chickens to this season suddenly took notice and we received help, a lot of incredible, fortuitous, almost magical help to make it come into being.
- We had to sell our possessions and live on Pot Noodle and coffee for several months to make it happen.
- The sculpture won an international award the day she was finished and shown for the first time. The first photos we published of her that day went viral around the world and the reaction to her was and continues to be nothing like we’ve ever experienced with anything else we have ever made. This makes us very proud.
- We were invited to show her at the Louvre complex in Paris, which we only afforded the travel costs for by successfully crowdfunding the project nineteen days before launch. A couple of days before the crowdfund launch date I had a weirdly vivid dream the entire crowdfund was funded by one person, the very first bid, by a man named Jonathan. The morning after the night we launched it, even before we had announced the launch date to our friends and family, the entire crowdfund was successfully funded by one person, the very first bid, by a man named Jonathan. No lie, I promise.
- Every single stage of the making of ‘Icarus had a Sister’ was punctuated by strange symbology and reference to angels, wings, feathers and pyramids (like the glass ones at The Louvre which she ended up being displayed directly beneath). It regularly freaked us out in a good way. More of this later in the travel blog.
- This sculpture is the closest thing to making a baby together that Andre and I ever did. And it’s an emotional, mental, physical investment that took a lot of sacrifice but has paid off in so many ways. It’s important to understand just how much it means to us to really understand this journey.
- When we finally sold the sculpture it was to a collector from Melbourne, Australia, who had fallen in love with a picture of it he’d found on the internet and wanted to buy it to honour the love he had for a very special lady in his life, to be the centrepiece for a house he was having built for them to share. At the time of sale, the house didn’t even have planning permission. So we had over two years between selling to finish making the moulds for the rest of the limited edition and strengthen and redesign certain elements of the sculpture to make it strong enough to survive the long journey to the other side of the world.
So ultimately, our reason for traveling to Australia was a formal business trip to meet this collector and oversee the installation ourselves. We could have left it down to the art couriers I suppose. But we needed to see our ‘baby’ installed in her final home, and make sure everything was perfect for this client that had had the faith in us as artists to buy her just from seeing a photo from the other side of the world. We needed to see the smiles on the faces of our clients when they saw what they had purchased for the first time and shake their hands for being the ones to finally buy the art we are most proud of in all our lives so far. We simply couldn’t let anyone else steal that moment from us or do a half-arsed job. It wouldn’t mean the same to anyone else to see her to her final home. Like sending someone else to watch your daughter’s graduation. Or someone else walking her down the aisle. No, this was one installation we needed to see through to the end, to dot the i’s and cross the t’s on every last detail ourselves even if it meant traversing the globe.
And we also agreed there was absolutely no point going to the other side of the world if we weren’t going to see a little bit of it. So after the hard work would come the big adventure. A reward for a job well done. Kind of like parents helping their kid move into their first home and then high-fiving each other and going out to buy a Winnebago.
So that’s the ‘whys’ briefly covered. And yes, that was the brief version. The ‘hows’ became a planning marathon that I was to take on all by myself (while Andre dealt with the main guts of the engineering behind the job and transportation logistics), all the time worrying that in my state of nervous exhaustion I would have cocked it up by booking us onto the wrong flight, or on the wrong day or to the wrong location. A combination of multiple flights, Airbnb gambles, friends’ spare rooms, buses, taxis, trams and boats would hopefully take us everywhere we needed to go. But this is me we are talking about. I can’t organise my own knicker drawer. This was a lot of trust for Andre to place in me to organise the most important trip of our lives so far. Quite possibly misplaced trust. But perhaps this was an opportunity to show him I am worth my weight in gold – planning the perfect trip, facing impending death by being stung, bitten or eaten by Australian beasties with so much courage that even André couldn’t fail to be impressed by me. Maybe this was the trip where he would finally get down on one knee and make an honest woman of me. Or get down on one knee, be bitten by a giant spider, swell up like up like a pumpkin, and choke on the weight of his own tongue before he could get the magic words out. Only time would tell.
I realise now, looking back, that we both knew so very little about Australia except for the obvious clichés – man-eating sharks, spiders the size of Godzilla, Crocodile Dundee, barbies (that’s BBQs, not the emaciated plastic dolls) and Vegemite. We genuinely had no idea what was there (apart from a big desert in the middle, and lots of Australians, some kangaroos…and of course, the sharks…
Rambling Pre-amble Part II – Perverts and Shark Training.
