Megan and Murray McMillan

When We Didn’t Touch the Ground: Photograph, Megan and Murray McMillan, 2012

When We Didn’t Touch the Ground: Installation, Granoff Center, Megan and Murray McMillan, 2012

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JR Uretsky is finishing one of the smaller lava furniture crates with a Festool dust-free sander. Tool nerds: be warned. Festool makes the bees knees.

These mylar angled shapes–that we’re calling a creek–is based on one of Murray’s childhood memories damning up his neighborhood creek [shout out to Roland Dickey + Joel Reeves!]. They will soon be backed by 3/4 plywood so it’s easy for a performer to walk on them.

We saw a $10,000 table that would be perfect at a antique store. Murray fabricated a quick version based on it out of plywood for, ahem, much less and JR Uretsky is staining it.

Update: we love this table so much that we actually ripped it apart after the show, rebuilt it with better wood, and it’s now our main studio table in Pawtucket, RI.

…So we removed the “blocks” from the lava towers and let them just be the shapes around the furniture. Much better. And we think the final project will looks sorta like this–with a dinner table. Because, of course, the natural end to play time when we were young was when our moms called us to help set the table for dinner.

Hmm. So we have the lava towers created. They line up beautifully with the floating room. We’ve also finished off the face of the front tower, however, now that we’re looking through the camera, it just doesn’t work as well as we thought when we designed it. There is something missing–or possibly something too much. It seems heavy handed. Something needs a big change…

…we Like the furniture and the lava idea, but the “blocks” of the lava towers seem to be at odds with the “block” of the floating room…

The lava furniture lines up with the floating room so that a performer will be able to hop from one giant stack to another.