A story built on a story and about far more

The Installation in 2012.

This is a story built on a story revealing a bigger story. It is, in other words, about far more than what I did, the mini project I finished. Instead, this is about My One True Project.

Nearly two decades ago, Nigel and I were living in Paeroa and doing up our house, a former New Zealand state house built in the 1950s, and extended in the 1970s. I did a lot of the physical work—stripping wallpaper, priming, painting, and plastering (my grandfather would be proud). We hired professionals to do things like asbestos removal, plumbing, electrical, floor finishing, and wallpaper hanging.

Nigel helped me with some of the things I worked on, but his main focus was the aesthetic aspects. Sure, he consulted me, absolutely, but he drove the choices. It was his thing.

When we were in the final stages of work on the house, he decided he wanted to create an artwork—though he never called it that—to decorate our refurbished home. He wanted four square canvasses, each painted one solid colour: White, pink, orange, and brown. I helped him buy the pre-prepared canvases and the paint. He hung them on S hooks on our rotary clothesline to spraypaint them, and I was with him, to help and advise, if needed.

He hung the finished canvases in our lounge, and they looked good against the new wallpaper. I never asked him why he chose the colours, what it meant, etc., but I said to him that, to me, it represented our house: The white and pink were relevant to the original 1950s house, and the orange and brown were related to the 70s, when the house was extended. He said nothing, but smiled. Maybe that was what he was thinking?

As is my way, I devised a humour-based name for it: I called it “an installation”, using a lower-jaw-forward phoney upper class New England accent in an impression of a pseudo-intellectual dilettante. He liked my schtick, as he so often did, and imitated it frequently, as he so often did.

When we moved back to Auckland’s North Shore in 2006, Nigel hung the panels above our TV (photo above), where they stayed until his mum gave us a new artwork. We never hung the panels at our last house together, where they remained stored in the garage. Maybe we would’ve hung them if we ever finished settling in.

Here in my new house, I found the panels packed in different boxes, and saw one had been lightly damaged by something pressing on it. I fixed that with an iron, just like I might for a bit of a dent in wood. And—then what?!

I thought about hanging them above the TV, just as Nigel once did, but I knew my limits: I don’t have the patience that Nigel had—or the accuracy, if I’m honest—to make sure the space between them was equal, along with them all being aligned horizontally.

I suddenly thought, “what if I make them all one artwork?”, and then my logical brain kicked in: “But how?” And that’s where it remained for months. Until last week.

I suddenly realised that if I used the multi-hole strips usually used to make custom reinforcements, I could easily attach the four panels into one piece. And that’s what I did (photo shows that work in progress):

Once done, I hung The Installation above the TV, where it had been two houses (and around a decade) ago. It’s now the same, but different.

I don’t have anything that Nigel created that’s not technological, mainly because he never made artwork. He didn’t think of himself as in any way creative in an artistic sense, but he absolutely was. For one thing, he was a WAY better graphic designer than I ever was—and I got paid to do that sort of work. So, the fact that he had a creative vision and saw it through, with minimal help from me, made The Installation special to me.

It also reminds me of happier times—specifically, doing up that house in Paeroa together, and our years living in that house in Auckland’s North Shore. Without even trying, I can picture The Installation on the wall in Paeroa, or above the TV in Auckland, and I don’t need photos to remind me.

That’s all in the past, though. I have a solo life now in a house that wasn’t completed while Nigel was alive. I’m now trying to create a new life, a new version of me, without Nigel—what I recently dubbed My One True Project.

Which brings me back to The Installation.

It’s special to me because Nigel created it, and for the happy memories I associate it with, so I then took all that and made something from it—I built something new from those pieces, exactly as I’m trying to do with my life. Some people would hate The Installation (yeah, well, “Arthur’s Law”, and all that). They might think it’s silly, pointless, maybe even a waste of space. Some might say the same of me and my efforts at building a new life. Clearly I don’t care about that, either.

The thing about creating—whether artworks or lives—is that it’s impossible to please everyone, and some observers honestly seem determined to see only darkness. What matters, in my opinion, is that we create what we must, and to never give a moment’s thought to what anyone else thinks.

So, in this case I built something out of pieces that Nigel created, just as I’m building a life made in part of all the bits and pieces I take from the life we had together. This mini project was really so much more, so much bigger, than it may seem. But, then, everything we do to create our lives always is.

Above is the before and after view from my chair. There used to be a big empty white wall above the TV, and now there's something there. It's a good result.