MODELMAKING GRAVEYARD

One of the strange things about being a stage designer is how attached you can become to a model that is only meant to exist for a short while.

You spend hours making them, trying to get every cut as clean as possible, carefully handling the glue tube that somehow always manages to drip exactly where it shouldn’t. You measure, cut, glue, trim, measure again, and stare at that piece of black foam paper wondering why it suddenly doesn’t fit anymore. And let’s not talk about how many times you are pricked by the needles, used to hold everything together.

In the end, you add all of the details, tapestries, miniature furniture, wires, lights, scaled figurines and it all looks eerie, a scene frozen in time. And then, once the model has done its job, convincing the director, stage supervisor, and technical team of the artistic vision, it’s no longer needed. The production moves on, the real set gets built, and the black box is left behind.

It ends up in a dusty corner, with the vague hope that one day it might be useful again. It collects dust, gets sun-bleached, and becomes a luxurious villa for spiders and their children. (The fathers are unfortunately absent. Their heads were bitten off shortly after the love-making process.)

This is a collection of some of the models I’ve made along the way. I’ll be uploading them here, so I can come back to them long after I’ve lost track of where they ended up.