In the days leading up to the opening night of Scale watching the exhibition build start to bring to life what I had been working towards for over a decade, I was very surprised by what I was feeling.
As the constructed walls transformed from wood to black and the 200 images were unpacked and expertly hung, there was an initial adrenalin rush as I realised the true scale of what was being created. I was finally starting to comprehend how big this exhibition actually was. Over two floors with a winding passageway created to move through the images, I was overwhelmed at just walking through one floor, let alone two!
The more the exhibition became closer to its finished version though, the more I felt removed from it. I had thought about what this moment might feel like for years, what the result of working on something, thinking about it every day, would be like. Honestly, it kind of felt like, well… nothing.
Wandering around watching the exhibition take shape, I knew the work was mine, I just didn’t have a connection to it in this context. I wasn’t used to seeing it presented in this way so I felt like a participant, looking at something I had seen one hundred times before.
It wasn’t until the opening night that I finally figured out why I felt a little numb. After being alone in a room with Scale for so long, it’s not looking at the work presented as an exhibition that was going to give me an emotion, it’s finally having someone else in the room with me and seeing their reaction.
It was so fulfilling watching people listen to the narration, sometimes intently, then leaning into the image to take a closer look at something that had captured their intention. That’s what I was craving, a reaction.
There’s two little moments that stand out from opening night. The first was listening to a person recount that after looking at the McCartney images and listening to the narration, they got emotional as the weight of everything that was written and played on the instrument washed over him.
The second was a man who spontaneously and seemingly much to his own surprise, knelt reverentially in front of Page Hamilton’s and muttered “oh god.”
As a creator, to see your audience have a response, any kind of response to your work is as good as it gets. I’ve mentioned before that Scale was always envisioned to be a physical exhibition and seeing the prints presented in a way that’s almost overwhelming due to the size and number of them, is all part of the physical reaction I want to induce from the exhibit.
KH