Alison Hanly: The making of TIBA work 'Elephants are big. Bigger than me.'

This is a little pictoral story of how this work (Elephants are big. Bigger than me) got made.

I have been tossing around the idea of trying to represent the actual scale of a real elephant. So far my work has been very literal and kind of illustrative. I have painted elephants that look like elephants, and though they carry the symbolism and hopefully carry a little bit of the dreamlike/subconscious mood I was aiming for, they were very contained on canvass. What I am actually interested in is how memory and specifically repressed memory can be overwhelmingly big, like an elephant. So recently I have been toying with ideas around demonstrating the actual scale of real elephants. I had thought to put something equaling of the weight of an elephant in the gallery. Initially I was thinking cans of baked beans, they are a recognisable weight, people know what it feels like to hold a can of baked beans. A mountain of then stacked up in the gallery would say a lot about the physical scale of elephants. But when I did the maths... it would take 11,765 cans of beans. even if I get them cheap at about $1 a can, that's a lot more money than I've got right now! And when a friend suggested I do it in peanuts, coz that is more obviously linked to the elephant theme, and I saw how light peanuts are and how expensive... well, I thought to myself that maybe this is an idea I can get a grant for and then work with a charity as well, who would perhaps be the beneficiary of all the cans. So in the future perhaps, but right now I needed another idea that would help me describe the scale of elephants. I decided to firstly describe the height. This i felt was the best option because the upcoming show was a group show and there was already some installation works going in. With limited wall space up is always better than accross. I also wanted to put it in context of a comparison with humanity. So i decided to paint a life sized me looking at a life sized elephant. An average height Asian elephant might be around 2.5 meters tall.

There was a large canvass I had in the studio that would serve the purpose well, it was origionally intended for the Now She Remembers show last May in fortyfivedownstairs. It got very close to being in the show but did not make the cut. It just wasn't resolved and I wasn't convinced it would fit in with the rest of the show. Sometimes really good paintings don't make it into a show simply because the others work really well as a group and it doesn't quite fit. I really liked it and wanted to use it somehow later and wanted to work on it some more before I showed it. Unfortunately I then decided to try and paint some red balloons on it and see if it would work in the Project Red Balloon show. That was not a good idea.

So I finally let go of trying to make it work and decided to start fresh with it. I felt a little sad about it but you gotta keep things moving, nothing worse than a studio that is just a graveyard for unresolved paintings.

So there it was, a fresh new start.
I took photos of myself and painted from looking at the camera. I figured out the best height to have it in order to frame the elephant and me, with the intention of then continuing the outline image onto the wall of the gallery.

After some working and re-working I had it pretty right.