News / Spike Island

It's been such a busy few months that I have only now come around to appreciate all the projects I've done this year already... March the 10th 2018 seems like a long time ago. On that bleak Saturday afternoon, Fionn and I, took the ferry from Cobh to Spike Island. As we approached the island, the melancholy, eerie mood, which was to stay with us during the whole visit, overcame us.

How was I ever going to create a TinyIreland model of this? The star shaped fort was hardly visible from the waterside - it is set into the island surrounded by a deep trench - and yet, it is its most remarkable feature. My initial idea was to somehow project the ruins and landscape around the fort onto its walls. So, I began by making drawings...

The views from the island of the harbour all around where breathtaking - beautiful and interesting. I fostered ideas of working this into the model as well...

It took us about 40 minutes to walk around the whole outside of the fort. We then entered through the impressive entry archway. This also needed to be featured on the model, I decided. But how could I accommodate the huge fort as well as its impressive interior buildings and architecture? If I made the whole thing to scale, the fort would be huge and the buildings absolutely tiny... and all this was to fit on an A5 card!!!!

 I love the patterns the buildings form - like playing cards folded out to line the interior shape of the fort...

After trying out various ideas, I also realized that the inward slant of the fort walls were important - they could not be vertical - it just didn't look right. This made the layout of the artwork much more complicated. It had to be arranged in a curved pattern:

This formed the exterior of the fort on the base shown. But I also needed the interior. I decided to place that on the reverse side of the card, which posed the challenge of alignment during printing.

And this is what it looks like when assembled!