Rocket Prints

Apologies for the lack of posts, i am up to eye balls in a major project!
But must mention a sale of prints at the rocket gallery this Thursday. Featuring Robyn Denny, John Hoyland and Ellsworth Kelly amongst many others. Nice.

Favela Painting

Amazing looking stuff form the Favela Painting project.
"This art....has the potential of working as a catalyst of social renewal and change"

Cardiff & Miller

I have tried to make (low tech) musical furniture before and really like this new work by Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller. Very different style to mine but the same ethos - Playing furniture as it were an instrument. Watch the video here.

Committee

With the London Design Festival not far off, here is one of my highlights from the past couple of years. A dysfunctional family of objects by Committee.

"Continuing their anti-design explorations, Committee’s ‘Plastic Fandangos’ are non-sense products; visions of quotidian items from a parallel universe that parody and expose the oddness of our own familiar gadgets. They were designed to explore our perception of usefulness in product design and to question why things have evolved to be the shapes they are."

Dancing Feet

Very cool looking little invite i got through the door recently.

(Really hope to make it Tom. xxx)

Ark Booktower

Totally stunning piece by Rintala Eggertsson Architects, part of the small spaces investigation at the V&A. This is very wrongly not getting the headlines, because it is a gem. Five levels of cheap pine, bits of blockboard, exposed screws, hex bolts and wire have never felt so good. Reviews all focus on this lack of 'finish' here, but it is so far and beyond that level of critique. It is emotionally at ease, and at the same time fully inspiring, its a library, its a house, a sanctuary, a swaying (it moves a lot) scuplture, its somewhere i would like to spend lots of time, and sleep given half a chance.
The shelf framework is infilled by the books, all facing outward, acting not unlike insulation within a stud wall. But because you can only see the edges of the pages, its essentially a mono colour exterior, only revealing every hue imaginable as you enter and see the books covers.
Towers, by their conception, are not usually discreet, they are structures of power and presence, but that dynamic is wholly subverted here.
(Check out their site if you have a chance, the floating structures and buildings are super cool too.)

Wolgang & Nouvel

Time for a little review of the Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition and Jean Nouvel Pavillion at the Serpentine which i recently mentioned. Starting with the newest piece first, Jean Nouvel, as i feel time is an important aspect. There are strict rules with the Summer Pavillion, but the main one is that the chosen architect is informed in January in the year of exhibition. That's not six months to figure out how to make and complete the winning design, its six months to Design the winning design, make and complete the structure. Some of my jobs take longer then that, and it may only be a kitchen! So hard and fast it is, with a towering leaning red shard, a beacon in a dry, yellowing Hyde Park, and i think it really works to start with. The enormous layered awnings, in red again, and which make up the main space house the cafe and seating, with events in the evening. But as you looks closely its starts to become an exercise in buying as many  matching red bits of furniture and materials as possible to fill the space. Red chairs, Red Twinwall, Red Glass blocks, Red table tennis tables (i want one), Red coffee makers etc that are not all exactly the same colour but not different enough either. I don't think it bad by any means, but it feels as though there was not quite enough time to get it right.

The Wolgang Tillmans show in the Gallery is an 20 year investigation of photograhy, and it shows, and it seriously works. It seems very simple, they are photograhs about surface or texture, narrative, or colour studies. But the colour studies do not look like images anymore as they have been folded in places, now resembling bent sheets of metal. The landscape photograhs look like paintings, there is small image of a mountain and glacier that appears more like a still life of  sinewy steak, or even a heart. There is technical brilliance which left me in awe, pushing the process of photograhy forward whilst elevating the mediums' artistic vocabulary. It has everything, in all the right places, in the right quantities, but still leaves you wanting more. I highly recommend.