Morning has broken...

First thing on Friday morning, I went into the Town Hall tunnels. My mum had come along to help, and as we opened the door my heart leapt into my mouth. Would the nets have frayed and fallen? Had the few that had dropped been an omen and they'd all be lying on the floor? I took a step inside, and saw that around 100 had fallen off their strings, but nowhere near as bad as I'd imagined it to be. Quickly we scooped up the fallen ones, and sorted a plan.

As the majority of the nets were already up, it was a case of filling in the blank spaces. I'd worked out the night before that if I did strips of netting with cranes hanging off it, we could then hang these like tinsel along the side of the tunnels and in the gaps between nets. We got to work, and my mum figured out a quick way of tying the fallen cranes (which had no thread) to the ones with thread, thus quickening the process and meaning we were saving on thread. Unfortunately as we went to put one 'tinsel' up the ladder it was tied to fell over, and we ended up with a clump, but that was the only problem.

Until the pigeon. When I'd gone to get a couple of chairs from the cells, I'd noticed a pigeon lurking (I actually thought it was the ghost for a moment). We'd left it alone, and it had stayed out of our way, but then unfortunately two town hall people came down and one freaked out, which understandably freaked out the pigeon, which then started flying up and down the corridor. I chased it out of the way of the netting, as much concerned that it would get caught and hurt itself as to the damage it could do, and grabbed a warden. Who then decided the best course of action was to shoo it BACK down the corridor full of netting and string. The poor pigeon was frantic, I had visions of everything coming tumbling down, and the town hall people weren't really helping. In the end we managed to get it back into the cells, covered the end of the tunnel with material to stop it getting back in, and it finally left through the now-open door.

This seemed a good time to break for lunch, when I saw the only part of Light Night I would see this year, the giant heron in the Tiled Hall. Which was cool. Then it was back to work, and shortly after my friend Rachel, who has done a great blog post about Light Night, and her husband Andy arrived. We showed them what to do, then left them to it while we went and tackled the courtroom (you'd forgotten about that hadn't you?)

The courtroom was fairly straightforward. Material for a river, worksheets to make boats on the table, and cherry blossoms EVERYWHERE. The foldageddoners had come through strong, and I had a massive bin bag full. Big shout out to Rob, Lisa, Dave, Sue, Elly, Liz, Fran and everyone else who I might've missed out who made blossoms for me.

Back down in the tunnels, and we had about fifty cranes left. I'd kept saying we could just perch them on the heating pipes as if they'd roosted, but we were so close to having all one thousand 'flying' that we pressed on. At five minutes to five a steward came down to ask if we were ready to open in five minutes, just as I tied the last cable tie to hang the final string. We were there. One thousand cranes were flying through the Town Hall tunnels.

Piece of cake, huh?

The day before...

On Thursday morning I got up early. The cranes were all packed and ready to go - glowing away flatpacked in sandwich bags then wedged into holdalls and bin bags. More sandwich bags filled my rucksack full of useful things like duct tape and netting and scissors and pritt stick (I never used the pritt stick, it just seems like the sort of thing you should carry if you're an artist). My helper for the morning (who was also giving me a lift in) had dropped out at the last minute, so I was going it alone. The taxi dropped me off outside the Town Hall, and I lugged my bags inside.

I got down into the tunnels and the first thing I noticed was that it was full of stuff. The porters hadn't got round to clearing it yet, so there were crates and chairs and trolleys and even a chaise longue! One of the Light Night organisers promised to get it sorted quickly (which she did), and disappeared off to fetch the ladders I was borrowing. She returned a few minutes later with the tiniest stepladders I've ever seen in my life. Seriously, they were the sort of ladders old ladies use to reach the top shelf in the kitchen. By standing on the next to top step and stretching really hard I could just about reach the pipes we were hanging the netting off. Unfortunately, because I was on my own, I wasn't allowed up the council ladders in case I fell off (which to be fair was a real possibility due to the rubbishness of the ladders). Pleas on Twitter for someone to come and sit with me were unsuccessful (though I had amazing people already coming later on). I was left, after a brief recounting of ghostly encounters by the porter, on my own with a thousand cranes, lots of netting, and absolutely no way of attaching them to the ceiling.

I have to admit I sat and had a little cry. Suddenly it looked like all the hard work was going to go to waste, because I needed the set up time so badly, and here it was ticking away with me sat on the floor in a dusty corridor with only a ghost for company.

Then I shouted at myself. I reminded myself how brave I'd been attending that first Light Night meeting when I hadn't known anyone and everyone else seemed to know each other. How easy it would have been to run away after I fell down the stairs at the budgeting meeting and embarassed myself. How when I'd got to 600 cranes and I was sick of the sight of them I could have given up. I stood up, shook myself off, introduced myself to the ghost and told myself to get on with it.

I emptied out all my bags and tried to work out a way to get going. My original plan was to put all the netting up then as more volunteers arrived they could climb ladders (I'd envisioned decent ladders, and at least a few sets) and string the cranes through. Clearly that wasn't going to work. So I hit upon the idea of laying the cranes out on the floor, then laying the netting over, tying the cranes, then lifting the whole thing into the air when more people arrived. I cut the netting into chunks for different parts of the tunnel, and started work.

As I was getting on with this my husband RobW (there were lots of Robs involved in my project) rang to say he'd left work to come in and help, and he arrived shortly after with a sandwich and a big hug, then got on with tying the cranes onto the net. For about five minutes before declaring it would take a million billion years to do 1000 this way (he wasn't quite so dramatic about it). We stood and puzzled for a bit - could we jam the thread through the netting rather than tying? Should we tie the netting up with cranes ABOVE it, like a balloon net? Finally we hit upon the idea of making strings across the netting which meant it was easy to tie the cranes to it, but we could still use the netting to hold it all together and to space the cranes. Then he chanced upon the idea of tying the nets at waist height, making it amazingly easier to tie them on, and also giving us the first glimpse of flying cranes. My friend Jane arrived and quickly and quietly got on with laying out cranes ready for us to tie on - taking an extended lunch break for me.

Soon we were flying, and by the time Katie arrived, an acquaintance from Twitter who'd responded to my plea for help, we'd got it down pat. She, like a trooper, took control of a net and got on with it. A while later Fran, Dave and Lisa (Foldageddoners), Brett, Aretha and RobC (friends from my husband's work), RobE (a fellow LightNighter) and the lovely aforementioned Jane arrived, and we soon had most of the nets ready to go up. With the teeny ladders it was a struggle until someone suggested rigging up a pulley system. This worked really well, and our first net was up! Then a porter walked through, laughed at our ladders, and offered to go and get us some proper ones.




With big ladders in play, it was nothing (nothing! it was a LOT of work!) for Dave, and later RobC to scamper up to the ceiling like a spider-monkey-super-squirrel, and before we knew it, the ceiling was covered in nets and we were rushing to sneak up the last one before the Town Hall kicked us out. We got it up, and around 700 cranes were dangling from the ceiling. As we were leaving a few cranes dropped down where the thread had slipped through the sellotape, but that was a problem for the next day. Saying goodbye to the ghost, we left for the night.


Thanks to Dave 'boiler-man' Naylor (@caramboo) for the awesome pics. I forgot to take any of the setting up!

On the night...

Full report coming soon...

And there's more

Now I'm firmly set on my installation, I was thinking about ways that it could be more...interactive isn't the word, but so that people could be more a part of it.

Walking through it is going to be amazing, and that's the main thing, because it will really put across the idea of lighting up the darkness and bringing peace and hope to the passageways of confinement and despair (good description huh? That's going on my submission). However, I know I like stuff I can interact with, or that does something, as sometimes I'll go and see something and I won't know when is a suitable length of time to stay there, or if I should say something about it or keep quiet...so it would be nice, for philistines like me who don't really know how to appreciate art, to have a bit of a focus. Plus, who doesn't love a freebie?

At first I thought of folding cranes on the night (in addition to the thousand) so people could join in and learn how to do it, but that would be crazy in the tunnels (hey! join my impromptu origami class in the dark), so then I thought of a piece of origami people could take away that could represent their hopes and wishes. Obviously the crane is a well-known symbol of that, but it would mean folding loads more cranes, and the thought of 1000 in an allotted time frame is making me gulp already.

I can make paper boats though. Not the paper boats you made as a kid (well I can make those, but I don't mean those ones). I mean the sailboats that are the symbol of the US Origami Society and the model I folded when I did a foldathon a couple of years ago (88 in an hour!):



I think that boats are pretty representative of taking a journey, which implies moving into the future etc. Plus, they're pretty. I had an idea that people could take one, and write their hope/wish onto it, then either take it home with them, or leave them somewhere (maybe at another Light Night event?) for someone else to find. Kind of like PostSecret. It means that people have something tangible to associate with my project, and it gives another dimension to my project. What do you think?

Tunnel vision

Yesterday I got the opportunity to go under the town hall to explore the tunnels. I'd asked one of the organisers of Light Night, so I could check them out before submitting my proposal, and he gallantly braved the ghost (yup, there's apparently a ghost, a murderer called Charlie Peace!) to show me round.

When Leeds Town Hall was built in 1858, there were 13 prison cells, offices for the police and accomodation for the warder built into the basement. New cells were later built under the front steps. Passages led from these cells to the courtroom, with locked gates keeping it secure.

The tunnels themselves were a lot bigger than I remembered from last year, the only time I've been down there. With all the lights on, they were quite similar to the corridors at work with high ceilings and archways:



However, as soon as you switched the lights off, they became the passages of imprisonment that they used to be, and you could quite imagine a ghost sweeping up and down the corridor:



I pulled out Blue Canary (the name the new prototype has acquired), and it lit up the tunnel a bit, and suddenly it was easy to see just how amazing 1000 cranes could look. I think they'll totally transform the space.

There were a lot of pipes and hooks and things that could easily support the cranes, and the ceilings (which I would say were about 10ft high) were plenty high enough that they can be strung over people's heads out of the way:



I'm completely convinced that it could all go ahead, and that if it does, it will look really really amazing. I'm also completely convinced that this is the right installation, in the right place, and I'm even more excited than I was before.

Now I have to do all the paperwork.