More on "The Floor"

"The Floor" - Floor covered with photographic imagery, Lindsay Colborne 1995

Entering the gallery was a daunting experience for some. Unsure whether to enter, they would stand at the front door and call out, "Is it OK to walk on this?"

"Yes", was the answer. Of course it was. Walking all over the art was the whole idea. Everything changes, particularly when you interact with it. Nothing lasts forever, everything is eventually destroyed and remade. The act of looking at the floor art as you walked on it played an active part in it's destruction. By helping to destroy the work as they looked at it, the viewers of the work played an active role in the theme of the work.

Since the work was nothing but glued-together bits of photocopy paper, I wasn't expecting it to last too long. I wasn't even sure if it would last through the opening night, but in the end it proved quite resilient and apart from a few nicks and tears, it stayed together for more than a month. Finally a dance party was held on it and "The Floor" was destroyed once and for all.
But that was not the end of it.

"The Floor"

"The Floor" - Floor covered with photographic imagery, Lindsay Colborne

The art gallery used to be an RSL Hall, so it had a lot of floor space. I was asked to be part of a group exhibition and when I walked in and saw the size of the floor, without thinking I asked the gallery owner, "Can I exhibit my work on the floor?" She said, "Sure."

At that stage I had no idea what I was going to do, except that I was going to cover the floor somehow. I had limited time to get the floor down, which left no time to develop my concepts concerning the nature of change, which will have to be the subject of a future floor, so this time I simply floated many of my existing photos of people in a sea of white. I tiled the images out on an A3 laser writer and glued them all together piece by piece, there were hundreds of them, maybe thousands. Each people-photo is life size and made up of about 50 A3 pieces. It took me two solid weeks of printing and gluing and positioning to completely cover the RSL Hall-sized floor.