There was a problem with the glue gun work. frankly i found it boring. i'm writing in the past because although i have recorded, made notes and sketches along the way. i have not made it digital until now.
but yes the polygon stuff was boring. i mean aesthetically it was pretty and interesting but it was a cosmetic project, it was skin deep.

 i began looking into things which actually interest me. the news of the world and the train crash that has been 2016. through it all though the refugee crisis in Syria struck a cord with me. the iconic images yes of course but more than that i was moved by the scale of it. the numbers involved. it seemed like a human migration on a biblical scale as four million people in Syria became refugees. 4 million. 4,000,000!. after a little while it hit me that this was something that i was interested enough in. Something which meant something more. the aesthetics came second place to expression. isn't that what we are all about?
i looked at art by  Ai Wei Wei and his work which saw 2,500 life jackets placed in neat rows in parliament square and took inspiration from looking into the representation of massive numbers behind the headlines. whilst i didn't have the resources he did. it was a challenge and something i wanted to tackle head on.

i came up with this.
A 90cm by 90cm grid with 10cm worth of border round the outside. The board would be filled with ninety rows of ninety nails, with eight thousand one hundred in total. Making each insignificant, one and a half inch boring, low quality oval head nail (the most common in existence) represent five hundred men, women and children... each. as there are four million refugees who have had to flee their homes since the war began in Syria.

So each nail is representative of 500 individuals.
once i had mapped out my grid, the seriously grueling task of hammering began.