It’s been a bad week.
I got news that I had missed out on a grant for which it would be hard to imagine I could have been any more perfectly suited. As a result, I’ve had to pull out of Sculpture By The Sea Bondi 2014. I simply don’t have the cash to make the work, nor do I have the time to think about crowdfunding etc.
This is a real blow, as I’d been planning for and working towards this work and exhibition for over a year. Unfortunately none of the other works I have in reserve were considered acceptable substitutions, as they were too different to the original. I feel like somewhat of a fool, having been telling people for over a year now that I was slated to exhibit.
On the plus side, I’ve learned how to make big changes to the layout of Aperture printed books, and as such I’ll be able to move ahead with the fine art print version of The Metaning, which turned out to be a lot cheaper than going through a local printer. The inability to easily edit layouts on a global basis was a major problem with Aperture’s book layout engine. Its master pages setup is quite opaque compared to something like InDesign, but once you discover the knack there’s a surprising amount of flexibility enabled.
Another bit of good news is that I managed to figure out what was causing a bug in The Metaning when read in iBooks on a Mac. It seems Webkit on the iPad is a little more forgiving of errors. Problem fixed, there’s just a little bit of cleanup to do, and a new version will be submitted.