Building, filling, measuring, and more number crunching

We've spent another productive day in the wood workshop, beginning with building the first of many of the forms that are to be placed on top of the bookcases. We applied wood filler to a couple of the moveable sculptures ready to be sanded tomorrow. 

After calculating more of the dimensions and angles of some of the other forms (we are producing a number of different shapes for the bookcases) these pieces were cut and the appropriate edges were tapered. Moving one of the wheeled sculptures up to the studio was fun, and the ease of doing so reassured me that wheeling the sculptures through town to the Lit and Phil may not be such a crazy idea!

Artists to question politicians over fair pay in political hustings

Scottish artists campaigning for "fair pay" from galleries are to challenge political candidates in an election style-hustings event this weekend.

Two artist membership organisations, A-N and the Scottish Artists Union (SAU) will host an event in Glasgow with representatives political candidates from major parties.

The cultural hustings will be held at The Whisky Bond on Saturday, May 2.

The event will be chaired by Jim Tough, executive director of the Saltire Society, alongside a cultural panel that includes Kyla McDonald, artistic director of Glasgow Sculpture Studios, artist Sukaina Kubba, academic Emma Flynn and a representative from the Scottish Artists Union. 

The political panel will include Moira Crawford of the Green Party, Chris Young from the Liberal Democrats, Gordon McCaskill, Conservative, Brian Smith, Trade Union and Socialist Coalition, with an SNP and Labour candidate to be announced.

Janie Nicoll, an artist, said: "Some publicly-funded galleries pay artists fairly, others don't and getting them to be transparent and open about their payment policies is the first step to making sure we all get proper payment for the work we do.

"The hustings debate is about raising the awareness of election candidates so they understand the importance of the issue and use their influence to encourage galleries to spend tax payers' money in a way which supports fair payment."

The event is part of a nationwide campaign Paying Artists campaign based on research showing that 71% of artists do not get a fee for exhibiting in publicly funded galleries - with 63% of artists having to turn down gallery requests because they cannot afford to exhibit for nothing. 

The event coincides with the artist-led city wide Glasgow Open House Festival in which artists will showcase new work or ideas within public and domestic locations. 

This year the programme features 200 artists across 50 venues.

Phil Miller, Arts Correspondent

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/artists-to-question-politicians-over-fair-pay-in-political-hustings.124639764

Today's new skill: how to plane wood

Its been another busy day in the wood workshop as today we have been building the final of our three moveable sculptures. This one is based on the existing book trolley that can be wheeled around the library.

We have followed the dimensions of the book trolley for our sculpture, but have altered the shape to be triangular at the sides, on a rectangular base. Making this shape required us to learn another new technique/skill, namely planing. After an introductory demonstration by Joe, we took it in turns to plane the edges of the two sheets of wood that would form the apex of the sculpture. 

It was hugely satisfying when the two edges fitted together neatly!

Tomorrow we will build a support structure/framework, and attach the wheels.

Cheeseburn Sculpture opens its gardens for the bank holiday

http://www.livingnorth.com/northeast/gardening/making-masterpiece

National Gardening Week is the perfect time to discover your new favourite garden. Here we learn about the hidden delights of Cheeseburn pleasure gardens, home to extraordinary sculptures

‘For people who love gardens, there are a lot of different things to explore, and the unexpected thing is that each garden area has a different piece of sculpture’

Pay a visit to Cheeseburn Grange, just 20 minutes from the centre of Newcastle, and you'll not only discover 11 acres of beautiful landscaped gardens, but a magnificent showcase for public art. Since inheriting the house in 1992, Simon and Joanna Riddell worked to restore the gardens, and set the stage to present contemporary sculpture by artists from the locality and from further away.

One of the first pieces you come to in the gardens, next to the new Stables Gallery, is an arresting three metre-tall ammunition shell, covered in feather scallops, which are coated themselves in dark grey poppy seeds. Named Stanza, it's the newest sculpture added to the gardens.Tyneside artist Sarah created the poignant work influenced by the poems of ornithologist Edward Thomas, who wrote about the birds he saw and heard at the Western Front during the First World War.

'We have a mixture of artists from recent graduates to people of a good age. Gilbert Ward – in his 80s, lives by Hadrian's Wall and used to teach at Northumbria University – created two beautiful collections of wood carvings, Bakers Dozen and The Fall, which are installed in the old potting sheds,' says Arts Consultant Matthew Jarratt, who draws on 15 years of experience at the Art Fund to curate the works in the sculpture gardens. 

He and estate owner and gardener Joanna teamed up in 2013 to create something quite special for sculpture in the North of England. In the grounds there are many different types of gardens: a formal parterre garden, the lawns, a walled garden space, a woodland area down to a river, a tunnel in the woodland walk, and they're even using a hemmell (a Northumberland stone building for livestock to shelter) in the farmland. 'We see the grounds as gallery spaces, and we are starting to use the pasture land on the estate as well,' adds Matthew.

'It's a part of the world that not many people know, so there is a real sense of discovery. It seems to attract people that like historic gardens and those into the arts.’

For Matthew, Cheeseburn Sculptures is about the gardens showing off the sculptures and vice versa. 'For people who love gardens, there are a lot of different things to explore, and the unexpected thing is that each garden area has a different piece of sculpture. The best pieces interact with the buildings, the walls and the trees.'

He and Joanna are serious about helping artists to display their work and the plan is to build on the numbers of sculptures and works in the gardens. They're also making the most of the new exhibition space in the Stables Gallery and Projects Space, and visitors on the May bank holiday weekends will get the first view of the exhibition by brothers Neil and Richard Talbot.

They are building up to a summer outdoor sound exhibit, for which they will work with the BBC's wildlife Sound Recordist Chris Watson, who counts David Attenborough's Frozen Planet series in his programme repertoire and they're already planning ahead to Christmas exhibitions.

To say this project is still in its infancy, Cheeseburn is one garden we'll be watching to see how it grows.

To read more about Cheeseburn and find out their opening weekends, head over to www.cheeseburn.com
If you want to find out how you can get involved in National Gardening Week, visit www.nationalgardeningweek.org.uk

Jacob Dahlgren - Kung Fu Panda - Workplace Gallery, Gateshead

Kung Fu Panda is a new video work by Swedish artist Jacob Dahlgren in which he films the reflected ambient light on an adjacent white wall at home, whilst his children are watching the eponymous animated feature film. Filmed in High Definition from a fixed camera position and projected as a single work in a gallery context Dahlgren’s Kung Fu Panda becomes an absorbing and constantly changing digital colourfield painting that manifests a subtlety at odds with the apparent chaos of the original film dubbed in Swedish, and the surrounding scenario as the artist’s children watch whilst carrying on their own everyday conversations.

In an adjacent room Dahlgren presents a readymade series entitled When The Sky Is The Limit. Consisting of framed double page spreads from in-flight magazines collected by Dahlgren, each image is selected, isolated, and framed according to its inherent relationship to abstraction.

Dahlgren's work is concerned with a dialogue between the authoritative singularity of pure formal abstraction and its position within a variable, complex and social shared culture. His repetitious collections of ubiquitous and ordinary objects, often domestic, industrially manufactured (and frequently, knowingly Scandinavian); stand in their gestalt form as proxy for High Modernist Abstract Painting and for all of the ideological territory that Twentieth Century Art Theory has staked out for it. The contributing objects, however, signify a collective and human aspect of society, each representing an individual choice, used in a unique way by its consumer. Together these objects stand for the group or community, and as such they become democratic rather than authored. Through endless ingenious amalgams of pattern, abstraction and mass-produced objects, Dahlgren's recent works purposefully inhabit modes of modernist painting, deliberately playing with the inherent autonomy of the source material.

Jacob Dahlgren was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1970. Dahlgren represented Sweden in the Nordic Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale. His work has been exhibited at, KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center/MoMA, New York, USA, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK, and Tramway, Glasgow, UK. He lives and works in Stockholm.
Jacob Dahlgren’s solo exhibition Third Uncle is currently showing at Workplace London until 9th May 2015, please visit the website for further information.

Exhibition open: 25th April – 23rd May 2015 

www.workplacegallery.co.uk 

Moveable sculptures in development

After days spent in front of a computer working out the dimensions for the moveable sculptures to be installed in our forthcoming exhibition at the Lit and Phil, it is a relief to be hands-on in the wood workshop using physical materials as opposed to digital mock-ups.

Today we made good progress and completed the first moveable structure. We still need to finish the surface, but the shape is made, and it moves!

Waiting for Los Angeles - A video installation by Uta Kögelsberger - Ex-libris Gallery - University of Newcastle

Ex-libris Gallery

Fine Art

University of Newcastle

The Quadrangle NE1 7RU

Waiting for Los Angeles is a new video installation by Uta Kögelsberger. The project grew out of the artist’s fascination with Los Angeles as the quintessential post–modern city; a city that defines itself through its tendency to ignore any form of coherence, its idiosyncratic city-image, its horizontal structure and its cultural diversity; all of which make up its attraction as much as they make any form of representation an impossibility. In spite of this resistance to representation, people all over the world have a mental image of Los Angeles.

The work is shot on a seemingly non descript natural platform located in Griffith Park – one of the few truly democratic public spaces in the city that attracts people from all walks of life. Griffith Park was donated to Los Angeles with the proviso that it was to remain untouched, uncultivated, and open to the public. Shot over a two year period, and edited down from 360 hours of footage, Kögelsberger’s video builds on the premise that if you stand in one spot in the park long enough, you no longer need to move through Los Angeles to see it; instead Los Angeles will move past you. The platform acts as a stage for the city to perform itself. People enter and exit like performers in a play with non-scripted conversations and actions: a 21^stcentury Waiting for Godot in Los Angeles, where nothing is really said but where all the little nothings add up to paint a portrait of this city that leaves so much up to the imagination.

Uta Kögelsberger is based in London and lectures at the University of Newcastle and most of her work is developed in the United States. She has previously been awarded the Stanley Picker Fellowship, the Berwick Gymnasium Fellowship, the EAA Award for Art in Architecture and the SPD silver medal for editorial photography. Her photo essays have been published in Wired (USA, UK, Italy), Esquire (Spain), Quo Magazine (Mexico), GQ (South Africa) and selected for American Photography. Her work has been exhibited at the Architectural Association, London; CGP, London, the Barbican, London; Bluecoat, Liverpool; Spacex, Exeter; Laurence Miller Gallery, NYC and the Glassell Project Space MFAH, Houston amongst others.

Success

“Success is liking yourself,
liking what you do,
and liking how you do it.”

– Maya Angelou

as seen on http://www.swiss-miss.com

Pythagoras comes in useful

Jodie and I have been back in the land of GCSE maths with Pythagoras' theorem. We've been number crunching to work out lengths of sides for our sculptures,angles etc.

Looking forward to building next week.

Restoration of the Mackintosh Building takes major step forward

https://www.a-n.co.uk/news/restoration-of-the-mackintosh-building-takes-major-step-forward

Glasgow School of Art has announced Page\Park Architects as the design team to lead the restoration of the Mackintosh Building after last year’s major fire

Page\Park Architects have been named as the design team which will lead the restoration of Glasgow School of Art’s iconic Mackintosh Building, following presentations by a shortlist of five leading practices in March.

“The team assembled by Page\Park Architects impressed us not only with their deep knowledge of the building, but of the wider work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh,” said Professor Tom Inns, Director of Glasgow School of Art. “They also bring an understanding of the building’s particular importance to Glasgow – its people and history – as well as of its status as an international design icon.”

He added: “This is the beginning of an exciting journey of discovery. There will be many fascinating questions to be addressed as we undertake this complex restoration project.”

David Page, Head of Architecture at Page \ Park Architects said: “We have, over many years, had the privilege to work on and in the context of the Mackintosh legacy, the highlight of which will now be the opportunity to bring The Glasgow School of Art into splendid re-use for its students and staff, the people of Glasgow and the huge audience beyond the city.”

The Glasgow-based architects lay claim to a track record in both restoring and reanimating the city’s major historic buildings. They have also worked more widely on array of Mackintosh’s designs from the domestic – at the Hillhouse, through commercial – at the former Glasgow Herald offices (now The Lighthouse), to his finest cultural and academic work at the School of Art itself. Work is expected to start on the building in spring 2016 with the objective of academic access from 2017-18.

Phoenix Bursary programme

The news comes as a specially curated group exhibition of new work by the artists supported by the Phoenix Bursary programme has been announced for the Reid Building at The Glasgow School of Art from 24 July – 2 August 2015.

Following the major fire in the Mackintosh Building last year, which dramatically affected the final year Fine Art students’ degree show, the GSA set up a programme with support a £750,000 grant from the Scottish Government and its sister academic institutions across the world. It offered the recent graduates up to 15 weeks studio time, a bursary and materials budget in order to develop their practice and create a project, with roughly half of the artists remaining in Glasgow with others taking the opportunity to work overseas.

Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Europe and External Affairs Fiona Hyslop said:“The response from institutions around the globe, in opening up their doors to welcome graduates from GSA, has been wonderful. I’m looking forward to seeing the work created by the artists as their talent rises from the flames.”

The Chromologist - for lovers of colour

I've just discovered a wonderful website called The Chromologist, with a mission "to delve deep into the world of colour, from art and home inspiration to food, fashion, literature and more besides."

"Colour informs our perception of the world around us. It swirls, flashes, hides and winks. It runs, gasps, melts and slinks – evoking emotions, memories and passions in all it touches."

The website includes colour related news, inspiration, ideas for homes, exhibitions and articles. 

One post that grabbed my attention was 

TAKE A PEEK INSIDE THE COLOURFUL WORLD OF THE CRAYOLA FACTORY

http://thechromologist.com/take-peek-inside-colourful-world-crayola-factory/

NERVOUS SKIES - A collaborative work by Amelia Bande, Deborah Bower, Mat Fleming & Annette Knol at NewBridge Project Space

As a self-confessed lover of colour, NERVOUS SKIES - A collaborative work by Amelia Bande, Deborah Bower, Mat Fleming & Annette Knol at NewBridge Project Space is a delight to my eyes.

"It’s the latest addition to their Gel Film series, an installation of 16mm film, slides and text. Text and colour collide in a light show, which is as vibrationally intimate as it is technically spectacular. Multiple projections dance a thin line between oscillation and stillness. The piece seeks to bring about emotional resonances, by precisely cut intense colour rhythms and chance symbiotic relationships in the mind, the eye and the heart.

Nervous Skies was written collectively using automatic writing experiments. The four artists contributed with short texts produced fast and non-stop which were activated by prompt start phrases. The material was collected and edited into a single story by Amelia Bande."

The enjoyment of colour, texture and movement within Nervous Skies reminds me of some of Norman McLaren's animations. 

NewBridge Project Space, 16 Newbridge Street West, Newcastle Upon Tyne, NE1 8AW, UK. 
Opening hours: Tuesday – Saturday 12-6pm

More playing with VPT

Jodie and I spent another day in the project space testing out video mapping using VPT 7. 

Yesterday was the first day that either of us had used the projection mapping software, but through a combination of online tutorials, web forums, software instructions and trial and error, we had managed to begin to learn the basics, and achieved some interesting results.

Firstly we tried projecting video footage onto a reflective surface. This was very difficult to see.

We then tried projecting onto the inside of a triangular form.

The video was different colours of silicone pouring down a surface. 

Later we projected different video footage onto the different sides of the inside of a triangular form.

The footage on the bottom of the triangle was difficult to see, and we decided that the colours needed to be stronger as the projector tends to bleach them.

Our last exploration was projecting onto a couple of forms, one of which was behind the other.

I've really enjoyed learning something completely new, and although it was very challenging, we managed to test out a range of ideas. 

Unfortunately we are not able to use this for our exhibition at the Lit and Phil because the equipment (a projector) will not be available as all the supplies in the media suite will be used for the undergraduate degree show. We will just have to hold onto our ideas and try them out later.

Mersey ferry gets the dazzle treatment from Sir Peter Blake

As part of commemorations for the first world war, the noted British artist has repainted a passenger boat in homage to anti-submarine ‘dazzle camouflage’

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/apr/02/mersey-ferry-peter-blake-dazzle-treatment-first-world-war

Mark Brown Arts correspondent

Thursday 2 April 2015

The Guardian

Seven ship painters spent 10 days covering a Mersey ferry in the reds, oranges, blues, yellows, pinks, greens, blacks and whites carefully specified by Sir Peter Blake and the one obvious thing now is that no one’s going to miss it.

“It is a crazy concept,” said Blake on board the ship he has now “dazzled” with wild colours and patterns. “They’ve done it so beautifully and it looks fantastic. It is very exciting to see it.”

The Mersey ferry Snowdrop has become the third vessel to be painted in this way in homage to the artists 100 years ago who painted British ships in “dazzle camouflage” to mislead German U-boat captains.

The organisation 14-18 Now, responsible for five years of art commissions marking the first world war centenary, estimate that 8 million people haveseen two contemporary dazzle ships that were unveiled last year on the Thames in London and on Liverpool waterfront. The Snowdrop is now the only one that will actually go anywhere.
Blake was chosen in part because of his long association with Liverpool, one that extends beyond his design for the Beatles album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club band in 1967.

On Thursday Blake recalled his first visits to Liverpool 63 years ago when he was stationed in Belfast for his national service. “I used to get the ferry from Liverpool. It was an old cattle ship and one had recently sunk so people were nervous, obviously.

“I remember coming back from Belfast on a New Year’s Eve and it was really rough – it was full of Irish Guards, all very drunk, and lots of nuns terrified of the soldiers.”
In 1961 Blake won the prestigious Liverpool-based John Moores Painting Prize – “junior section”, he stressed – ahead of artists including David Hockney and Lucian Freud.
“I’m very proud of it,” he said. “I remember coming up on the train and having a party in my room at the Adelphi and meeting the Liverpool poets. It was pre-Beatles, they hadn’t broken yet, but there was a definite vibe in the city and great music going on.
“I do feel like an adopted son.”

The artwork, called Everybody Razzle Dazzle, is the biggest of Blake’s long career, but creating it was similar to doing a small watercolour, he said.

Working on a computer, he initially planned it all in monochrome but quickly realised it needed colour. “It has to be cheerful: it would have been dour in black and white really.
“I was slightly nervous that there might be some diehards who’d think I’d messed it up, they preferred the old livery. But I was very respectful of it: I checked things like whether I was okay to change the funnel.”

The plan is for the Snowdrop to have its Blake livery for two years. It set off for its first newly dazzled journey on Thursday with Bill Haley and the Comets’ Razzle Dazzle playing on a loop.

Not far away from its setting-off point is is a static vessel, the Edmund Gardner, dazzled by the the Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez last year.

Liverpool’s mayor, Joe Anderson, said the city was proud to have great things in pairs: two great cathedrals, two great football teams. “We’ve got two ferries and I hope the other one will be painted as well ... I was told not to say that.”

The dazzle ship project shines light on a story largely forgotten today. During the first world war, professional artists would paint wild patterns on British ships to confuse the enemy. The idea was that U-boat captains would spot the ship but have no idea of what class it was, or if it was coming or going.

It was, Blake said, the invention of optical art and he had a great time following in the original dazzle artists’ footsteps.

Blake praised the painters at the Cammell Laird shipyard in Birkenhead who had done the hard work. “We came up about a month ago when they were still working on it. To see it today when it’s all beautifully cleaned and polished is terrific.”

Arthur Hardacre, who led the team of painters, said it had been a bit like a very big paint-by- numbers exercise. “It was no big problem really, it’s all paint.”

The result is magnificent though. “It is absolutely fantastic and it’s great that visitors to the Mersey will see such a colourful ship.”

The project was commissioned by the Liverpool Biennial, 14-18 Now and Tate Liverpool. 

Neon with neutrals

Lovely colour combinations - neon with neutrals, displayed in a neat but funky arrangement

Victor Pasmore: In Three Dimensions, The Hatton Gallery

Following on from last year's Basic Design exhibition, one of the exhibitions currently at The Hatton Gallery is Victor Pasmore: In Three Dimensions

'Bringing together fifteen works from the Arts Council Collection, as well as three loans from the British Council Collection this exhibition features the work of one of the most important British artists of the post-war period.

Charting Victor Pasmore's career as it evolved from early figurative paintings to abstraction, this exhibition reveals the sensitivity to form, balance and shape that runs through his work.



Over the course his long career, Pasmore’s art changed direction several times, moving from atmospheric views of the Thames in the 1940s to wholly abstract works in the 1950s and 60s. Early on he was associated with the Euston Road School and its search for an objective recording of visual reality. After a dramatic conversion to abstraction in 1948, he produced some of the most radically uncompromising paintings and reliefs of the period - a move which renowned critic Herbert Read described as ‘the most revolutionary event in post-war British art’.

I am fascinated by the notion of painting in the expanded field, the move away from two-dimensions and into three-dimensions, giving the audience a more active role in the viewing experience.

http://www.twmuseums.org.uk/latest/news/victor-pasmore-in-three-dimensions.html

http://www.twmuseums.org.uk/hatton-gallery/whats-on/exhibitions/victor-pasmore-in-three-dimensions.html