Not Your Average Day at the Office

Have you ever wondered what a typical day looks like at Making Trails?

The honest answer? There usually isn’t one.

Some days we’re on the road, meeting clients, scouting locations, or installing giant sculptures in busy town centres before most people have even had breakfast.

But today?

Today is a studio day.

After the school run, I arrive at the workshop to find Jason already hard at it. He gets in at a truly offensive hour, so by the time I walk through the door he’s often already clocked up a couple of hours.

First things first, coffee.

Not instant, not a kettle, and definitely not an afterthought.

Our coffee machine is something of a studio institution, and quite possibly one of the hardest working pieces of equipment in the building. Before a single email gets answered or a paintbrush gets lifted, the first of several proper coffees is underway.

With fresh coffees in hand, Jason and I do a run through of the day ahead, deadlines, priorities, production updates, material orders, and which giant sculpture is currently demanding the most attention. When you spend your days building large scale public artworks, there’s always something to keep an eye on, from resins and fillers to paints, fixings, and all the other wonderfully messy materials that bring our sculptures to life.

Jason, in a rare moment of self control, has a strict lunchtime coffee cut off. Apparently I’m a bad influence. Personally, I prefer to think of it as maintaining creative energy.

Right now, Jason is deep in production mode, refining the front of Gertrude the Gonk.

Gertrude is the female counterpart to Gary the Gonk, who made his debut last Christmas, and with our first full scale giant gonk trail launching this November, the studio is very much in build mode.

There’s sanding, filling, tweaking, stepping back, looking again, and making tiny adjustments that most people would never notice, but that make all the difference when you’re creating something designed to stop people in their tracks.

While Jason gets stuck into sculpture work, I switch gears and head into the less glamorous, but equally important side of trail making.

That means catching up with artists, checking in with clients, reviewing design approvals, chasing suppliers, replying to emails, and making sure all the moving parts are… well… moving.

Then it’s onto the paperwork.

Funding applications, planning applications, permissions, logistics, timelines, budgets, launch plans.

There is a huge amount of behind the scenes work that goes into every trail, and honestly, it often comes as a surprise to people new to this world. The sculptures may be the visible part, but underneath every successful trail is a mountain of planning.

And somewhere in between all of that, we make time for the projects closest to home. Our passion projects.

That might mean checking in on our Brewhouse Community Garden plans (some huge news coming about that very soon!), catching up on the latest from Burton's Bollards, speaking with volunteers, or finding new ways to keep creativity flowing through our local communities alongside our larger commercial projects.

By the end of the day, we’ve usually switched between maker, project manager, fundraiser, logistics coordinator, artist liaison, community organiser, and chief coffee drinker several times over.

Not your average day at the office. And honestly? We wouldn’t have it any other way.