Year Six of the Pandemicene.
I haven’t been unmasked in a shop, or around crowds of people, or to a bar, club, restaurant, cinema, or social event since the Queensland borders opened at the end of 2021.
I have still not had Covid, and I have no intention of changing that. “Getting back to normal” could not mean less to me.
Every Covid infection adds permanent cumulative damage. If you want to understand cumulative damage as a concept, cut off a phalanx from one of your fingers each time you’re infected.
My art practice this year is going to be based around EPUB photography books, and Sculpture. I’m moving full-steam-ahead with outfitting a workspace in Brisbane, where I can travel for a week at a time to get practice in on my welder.
The first major part of that will be buying a large tool chest to fit under the workbench I’ve already set up. Part of that will be fabricating (if an off-the-shelf product is not available) jacking feet to replace the castors which are too high for the table’s low end on the sloping floor. With the tool chest in place, I can move all my gear into well organised drawers, reducing the effort and physical stress of opening and searching through boxes to find tools.
I’ll be building frames from the box section I have, that will allow me to mount my bench tools on the workbench. The plan is to run box section front to back across the table top, and then weld bolts pointing upwards to the box section, which will locate and bolt down the bench machines. The box section rails will have a back stop that goes behind the tables rear edge. A similar feature at the front, with a hole in it, and a nut welded in front of that hole, through which a jacking foot is threaded, with a wing nut welded to its end. So, you turn the wing nut, and the jacking foot screws towards the front face of the table top, acting like a vice clamping the whole structure to the top of the table.
The goal of that is for the machines to be secure in use, but movable and reconfigurable.
I’ll be buying a second set of some shelves I already have at the workspace, to scavenge the horizontal shelf supports, so I can add extra shelves into the existing shelving, which will let me move more of my steel lengths stockpile into lower shelves, and have remaining high shelves liberated to fill with plastic boxes of materials.
With those materials removed from my current storage facility, we will be able to consolidate and close down our second storage locker, which should save several hundred dollars a month in storage costs.
Assuming all the studio setup goes well, I should be able to start making works. I’d like to get into my Gomilife projects, but it might be enough to simply play with the box section I have, and get dialled in with the welder.