p.28 Make Ready Peter Maybury ISBN 978 0 9566293 3 3, Gall editions, 2015
“Being there
I actually never saw N cubed. I meet Tom just afterwards. The book ISBN: 0-9540242-20-4 is an account of the making of Ireland’s first pavilion at Venice, beginning with its demolition, and with a text on its origins and some images of the built pavilion.
So the task is to fictionalise something without having experienced it first-hand, from the considerable (but inevitably limited) available material. Work is seldom made with retrospect in mind. In the unearthing and translation of complexly interrelated research material Tom acquiesces to some design decisions at the expense of accuracy – an instance of the pavilion is inverted on the slim grounds that it looks better (but sixteen years later it still does). I am trying to best make it for myself. A few photos are taken for specific narrative needs, plugging in holes, but the thing itself is gone.
The bones of St. Nicholas of Myra are said to have been divided after the city of Venice raided his remains seeking replacement for the relics of its patron St. Mark which they had mislaid. On opposite sides of the interior of the slipcase, images of two corresponding skeletal remains, which share the bones between them, face each other. The 1,676 bales of peat briquette which comprised N3 were held with concealed rods and glued together for structural integrity. On removal from its slipcase, exposed thread-sewn and glued signatures at the spine of the book reveal its structural mechanism in an instance of mimicry.”
