From the very beginning, I always knew that my “guitar idea” (which is still labelled as such on my computer) was going to take some time.
I didn’t have a specific timeline, in my mind it was going to take as long as it was going to take which was at least three or four years by my count back then.
According to my early pitch emails it went something like this, “There will be a book and an exhibition that will take place during 2017/2018″ LOL.
The intent was always for Scale to be seen as an exhibition. I wanted people to come and see images that had been created with every decision focused on the final output, full sized guitar images printed to scale. I always knew there would be a lot of them too, though I never had a specific number. The universe kept on presenting me with cool guitars and their stories. I just kept shooting them.
Around 2018, you know, that time that I was meant to have been finished, it dawned on me that I could probably never exhibit all these guitars in one room, challenge accepted! It then became about how mind blowing I could make an exhibition become and how each one could be different.
An exhibition is not just about seeing a collection of detailed prints and their stories. I wanted people to be blown away by what I had created when they enter the space, almost overwhelmed. To walk into a room and see Paul McCartney’s Hofner next to Kirk Hammett’s ESP next to Johnny Marr’s Rickenbacker next to Jonsi’s ‘Bird’, well you get the idea. To then discover insights from each artist about their instrument through their relationship with it, I wanted to invoke the initial thought, how did one person do all this? The answer is patience and determination. This is the reason I kept everything offline.
Sometimes with social media I feel like people are just trying to sell the dream of the creative endeavor they’re about to undertake with the fuss they make about the announcement of something they’re even yet to start! I wanted to go in the totally opposite direction. To work on something, keep it all offline and then present it in one big bang, Ta-dah, this is my new project. Obviously when I started I didn’t think it was going to take near on twelve years, and let me tell you there have been so many moments when I wanted to post about where I was, like visiting Metallica HQ in San Rafael, or eating cold pizza with Fletcher Dragge at his house, or having a glass of wine with Courtney Taylor-Taylor or having John Frusciante call me on my phone while I was driving in Manhattan after we both forgot about a zoom meeting, but I’m glad I didn’t.
I got to live in moment a lot more without the pressure of needing to capture everything I was experiencing. In fact, a lot of the time I totally forgot to document anything at all as I was so engrossed in my process.
Now as the project is about to launch with a bang, there is just too much to even try to include in that initial bang so it’s cool that I get to tell these stories over time and relive them all twice.
KH