Ply wood frames

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This is Linda Bernhard (visit her website here) and these are the frames I made for her for the Jungkunst exhibition in Winterthur, near Zurich, Switzerland. All of the work is paper collage on greyboard of a variety of thickness. The white frames were pretty straight forward, the collages were float mounted onto backing mountboard and framed. The plywood frames were not so straightforward but a joy to make...

So how did we get to the hanging (not me, the frames!) point?

Well, when Linda first came to see me with her work, she mentioned that she had asked a couple of framers if they could make her some plywood frames and they said it wasn't possible. I had other ideas and having long loved the decorative rather than the practical properties of plywood I said I'd give it a go.

Firstly we had to work out the depth of the frame and, most importantly, where the glass and collage were going to be situated within it. Then, how to realise this!

After several experiments with a local  carpenter who has some great tools we eventually got the depth of groove right. It couldn't be too deep or the lip would snap in the Morso mitre cutter nor too shallow as it meant there just wasn't enough tolerance to make everything fit nicely together. The Goldilocks groove!

Once this was worked out, it was a case of precision cutting, an OCD approach to dust removal (just sliding the glass into its groove created tiny particles...) and belief!

It all turned out fine in the end, the last thing to do was wrap them to within an inch of their lives for the overland journey to Switzerland....

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