Wishing Star Project Test and an Ebb and Flow update

A little while ago I posted an update on The Wishing Star Project. I wrote about filling my first storage box with 10 Imperial gallons of stars and showed you some pictures.

Yesterday I did a test layout of the piece. With some help from David and my friend Monique, we did a sample of the centre of this labyrinth pattern.

David took some pictures of the process. We started with just circles.

Monique used a custom funnel that I made from card stock. It lays down a strip of stars approximately 6 inches wide.

Then I started opening the intersecting pathways.

Here’s a detail of one of the finished intersections,

and here’s a view across our test section.

We got the sample laid out and cleaned up again in under an hour, which was about the amount of time I had anticipated. I learned several things from this process.

A better system for laying down the stars would be useful: perhaps an adapted dispenser of the kind gardeners use for spreading things like grass seed and fertilizer. I like this idea because it would mean no one had to crawl around on their knees to lay out the labyrinth.

The strip of stars could be a bit narrower, say 10 cm (4 inches) and the paths definitely need to be wider even if I don’t make the labyrinth wheelchair accessible.

Even with narrower strips of stars, I will need more than the 40,000 that I initially estimated as a minimum. I can still achieve the volume of stars required within the time frame I have allowed if I fold some stars in the daytime (instead of just evenings) and if I mostly make the largest size of star. Although the stars would go farther if I limited them to a single layer, having them thicker looks better.

Now, the Ebb and Flow exhibition update. I wrote about my entry having been accepted and promised a link when images of all the works were posted. The page is now up and running and you can look at the whole show by clicking here.