Story of Simon Birch
People often ask about my inspirations and how I developed @the14thfactory. This is my story...
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As production progressed more people jumped in to help and I must shout out Peter Yuill and Movana Chen who came out to help from Hong kong. Our main contractors, Mainstay Fabrication, were awesome, including Richard who previously built balloon dogs for Jeff Koons, Austin who let us drive his pickup truck, Antonio, Paul and Rebecca, Aldo, Rachel the best welder ever and many more...
Over a few months, we renovated the whole building and started to install the works piece by piece. It really was a handful of people during this period that did it all. We had so little money we had to all just get stuck in and do our thing, including my then gf too who was a trooper.
I lived in the venue, literally, and had cold showers for about 6 months and slept on the floor but to be honest, I didn't mind at all. Even with no money, and under constant threat of eviction as we were always behind on rent and so much stress as we innovated around cutting costs, I was still getting to finally build the project I'd dreamed of for many many years, rough around the edges as it may be.
