Friday 12 December 2014

Photography and Art

An interesting discussion is going on in the pages of The Guardian on this topic:

It was kicked off by Jonathan Jones having a rant, saying photography is a technology and can never be art:


The $6.5m canyon: it's the most expensive photograph ever – but it's like a hackneyed poster in a posh hotel


 In the comments, a reader points out Jones took the opposite view in an January 2013 article:


Photography is the art of our time


And in another Guardian article,  Sean O'Hagan pours scorn on Jones' views, calling them "quaint" among other things: 


Photography is art and always will be

 I enjoy Jones' rants although I don't agree with him about photography and art and I simply don't "get" some of the art that he thinks is marvellous.


Friday 28 November 2014

Thomas Heatherwick

Last summer's competition for a sculpture for Derriford Hospital appears to have gone to sleep (see previous post) but one good thing to come out of it was a £20 book token for getting shortlisted.

I added 99p to the token and bought Thomas Heatherwick's "Making", a thumping great tome of a book listing a lot of his projects.

I like the layout!  Most of the projects are dealt with on a 2-page spread, which makes it nice and simple to read.  I've adopted the same idea for the research and design journal I'm doing for the "Public Realm" assignment we're currently doing at college.  In it, I've included a page about Heatherwick himself.

 One thing I'm not so keen on;  Heatherwick simply lists projects without saying whether or not they were actually made and I suspect that plenty of them weren't.

In some ways, Heatherwick represents the sort of creator that I would like to be, although I've probably left it a bit late in my own life to be saying that!

In any case, I like
  • The way he is willing to take on anything to do with design, whether it's a piece of art, a building, a bridge, a London bus or anything else.  
  • His approach of spending a lot of time and effort trying to get to the essence of the requirement before starting design work.  
  • His desire to push boundaries (and accept that this will sometimes result in failures).
  • The way he spends a lot of time and effort experimenting with stuff, often as a sort of intellectual exercise with no particular project in mind.
  • He works in any material
One big lesson to learn here is that some of his most successful projects are a sort of culmination of previous experiences.   Two examples:



 UK Pavilion at the World Expo, Shanghai 2010
This evolved over a period of more than a decade.  It started by looking at the way Play-doh was squashed through holes in toys depicting hair growing.  Heatherwick used the concept on other projects before creating this monster one.

Cauldron at the 2012 Olympic Games in London
Heatherwick used similar hydraulic power systems to create bridges over waterways that roll up to allow the passage of boats.  Interestingly, the design of the cauldron has been the subject of intellectual property wranglings - see this article in the Guardian.


Sunday 23 November 2014

Anselm Kiefer

The Guardian's Jonathan Jones. who I've admired ever since he slagged off some of the world's foremost art theorists, recently wrote that Anselm Kiefer was "the most liberating painter since Jackson Pollock".  

 In another article,  Jones called Kiefer's exhibition at the Royal Academy "an exciting roller coaster ride of beauty, horror and history".

So I decided to go and see it while my wife did some Christmas shopping in Fortnum and Masons, on the other side of the street.

Well,  Kiefer's pictures certainly are dramatic.  Most of them are enormous - one is more than 12 ft high and 25 ft wide - and some of them make use of materials like lead, ash, cracked clay and crumbling earth.   

The engineer in me kept wondering how they managed to transport such huge objects that in some cases must be incredibly fragile and in other cases, incredibly heavy.  Apparently, the Royal Academy  allowed for an extended period to set up the exhibition.

The other question that bugs me is who would buy such enormous works of art?  You'd need to have an extraordinary scale home to accommodate them.

Kiefer, by the way, has two really extraordinary scale "studios".  

One of them is a 200 acre compound in the south of France.  When he moved there in 1992 he needed 70 trucks to move the contents of his studio.  Now, apparently, he'd need a lot more.  A review in the Guardian by Michael Prodger says: 


 "There are Kew Gardens-size greenhouses that are used as immense vitrines containing a 12-foot lead battleship washed up on a choppy sea of broken concrete or a full-scale lead aeroplane sprouting sunflowers. Elsewhere there is a cathedral-like barn with six house-size paintings in it and an underground temple of Karnak, where the columns were made by digging out the earth from around the foundations of the buildings above. There are tunnels and subterranean hospital wards, a lead-lined room full of water and a series of pavilions, each bigger than a squash court, with doors that open like an altarpiece triptych to reveal a single work inside. Metaphysics and megalomania are mixed on a daunting scale, and the effect is overwhelming."

Kiefer now spends most of his time in his other "studio" -   a 36,000 square meter former warehouse of a department store on the outskirts of Paris.

So what about Kiefer himself?    He was born in Germany at the end of World War II and is fixated on history, particularly the horrors of the Nazi era.  He managed to get into trouble in Germany by using the Nazi salute (which is illegal) to try and encourage Germans to address rather than suppress their recent past.  

He's also fascinated by German legends,  books, alchemy and the work of a poet, Paul Celan.

His paintings are incredibly powerful, partly because of their huge scale and partly because of the dramatic way in which they are "painted" - as noted, he "paints" with all sorts of odd materials.  I particularly liked Winter Landscape and a series of views inside a wooden hut, as in this picture.  I also liked his sheets of lead with diamonds embedded in them.

He also does lots of other non-painting stuff.

I liked his tanks of water containing rusting models of submarines, which were in the entrance courtyard of the Royal Academy.  As Jonathan Jones writes in his review,  they look like parodies of Damien Hirst's shark.

I really didn't "get" Kiefer's huge books.  You can't actually turn the pages because they're so massive  and so delicate - they make use of plaster.  And the images I could see didn't do anything for me.

Overall, I think I should have done some research before going to the exhibition, so I had a better idea what I was looking at.

UPDATE:  I hadn't realised that there was a TV documentary about Kiefer on BBC1 last Tuesday.  Here's a link to it on iPlayer - it's  only got a 4 week shelf life.

I came away from the documentary thinking Kiefer is quite extraordinary - the sort of artist I would like to be.  His interest in history is really about time and death and rebirth - how the atoms that make up everything in the world are constantly recycled.   One of the reasons he needs such big studios is that he never throws anything away - he says he's waiting until he finds a use for it.

Sunday 2 November 2014

Tower Poppies

Here's an article by The Guardian's Jonathan Jones about the "Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red" - the 888,246 ceramic poppies in the moat of the Tower of London:

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2014/oct/28/tower-of-london-poppies-ukip-remembrance-day?CMP=EMCARTEML6852

In a nutshell, Jones says he dislikes it because:
  •  It glorifies war - he suggests a moat full of barbed wire and bones would be more apt.
  • It pays homage to all of the British people that died without recognising the equivalent loss of life in other countries, notably Germany, France and Russia.  Jones calls it "a Ukip style memorial"
Jones says it's "humbling" to see the number of people viewing the poppies - an estimated 4 million by Remembrance Day on Nov 11, when the installation will start to be taken down.

He appears to think they would get more out of visiting the exhibition of Anselm Kiefer's work at the Royal Academy, which he clearly loves; he calls Keifer "the most liberating painter since Jackson Pollock."

Personally,  I think the poppy installation looks great.   I haven't seen it in real life but my wife and I have bought a poppy.   If I only had a brief time in London before Nov 11, I'd go and see the poppies, not Kiefer's exhibition.

I see Jones' points but this is all about paying respect, never forgetting the sacrifice made by all the British people that died in World War I.  And to me, the swathes of poppies provide a moving way of visualising the huge numbers of people that died.  I think visitors are able to grasp that this is just the British side and equivalent tragedies happened in other countries.

Jones' "humbling" comment speaks volumes.  I think art should arouse emotions and the poppy installation clearly does that among millions of people.  What makes their views less important than those of the art world elite?

UPDATE 1:  A follow-up article by Jonathan Jones, justifying his remarks in quite a justifiable way:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/31/world-war-one-poppies-memorial-cameron

UPDATE 2:  On Sunday 16th May I visited the Tower,  the "Women, Fashion, Power" exhibition at the Design Museum, the "Who are you" objects made by Grayson Perry in the National Portrait Gallery and Anselm Kiefer's exhibition at the Royal Academy.

I'll  write a separate post about Kiefer.

On the poppies, a lot of them had been removed, following Remembrance Day on November 11. All the same, the viewing areas were crowded with people.  It just goes to show how public art can have an enormous impact.


Having said that, I agree with Glen Carter, our glass lecturer, that the poppies streaming out of one of the Tower windows and forming a wave elsewhere - see photo above - look naff.  Perhaps more importantly I don't understand what they signify.




Thursday 30 October 2014

Inspired by

For the sake of completeness I'm going to make a quick mention of my submissions to the V&A's "Inspired by" competition, both of which were failures:

Light Waves


 While I was doing an evening course in glass at Plymouth College of Art, I submitted this:


Entries have to be inspired by something in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

In this case, the starting point was Edmund de Waal's "Signs and Wonders" installation - objects that de Waal made in response to his favourite exhibits in the ceramics galleries which he arranged in a steel channel running beneath the dome above the museum's entrance.

I started out planning to make a small section of the channel in cast glass on to which I would place my own objects.   However, I couldn't see how to cast it as a single piece so I sliced up the channel into segments.   I then decided to make the top flange curl over like a breaking wave and abandon the idea of placing objects inside the channel.

After I'd made the wave segments I played around with how to present them and decided they needed to be placed over a hollow cast plinth and with very bright lights in it.   The very bright lights turned into 72 light emitting diodes on strips.

For more about this project, please click here.

In retrospect, I did a really poor job of grinding and polishing the glass on this project so that might be one reason why I got rejected.

Faces

This was a study of facial expressions and the emotions and attitudes they convey.  I produced it for  the "Artist-Designer-Maker" assignment at college:


This wasn't really inspired by an exhibit in the V&A but I pretended it evolved from "A Captive Audience?" by David Reekie.  It has similarities - identical figures in an array, one different from the rest etc.

For more about my Faces project, please click here.

I wasn't terribly happy with the outcome.  Also, I got a photography student to take the shots that I sent in to the competition and I think they could have been better.

Lessons

  • I should have looked at what won in previous years, to steer my choice of topic
  • Put a lot more thought into photography
  • Be more genuine about picking an exhibit as the starting point for a project






Monday 27 October 2014

Movers and Shakers?


Here's a list of 100 most influential people in the art world, according to the magazine Art Review:

http://artreview.com/power_100/

My question is:  Who are they influencing?

I suspect it is themselves - the art world elite breathing in their own fumes.

For instance, why isn't Grayson Perry in this list?   I'm sure his Reith Lectures and TV programmes have influenced far more people than Art Review's picks, most of whom are curators, collectors, museum directors and gallery owners.

And why isn't Charles Saatchi among them?  Perhaps because he hasn't got sucked in to their incestuous world?

The artists they've picked also seem a little strange to me.   Why  Jeff Koons and not Antony Gormley, Tracey Emin or Damien Hirst?  

Here's the ones that did make the grade:

5:  Marina Abramovic

Highest placed artist.  She "performs" - focusing on the relationship of artist and audience, and the limits of body and mind.  She started off being masochistic, playing with knives and fire for example, but now seems to focus on passivity.  In one of her famous performances she sat for hours on end with members of the audience taking turns to sit facing her.

Guardian article about a recent performance:
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jul/18/marina-abramovic-halfway-through-512-hours-serpentine

Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Abramović

I don't get it.

7:  Jeff Koons

Another Andy Warhol?  

His website: http://www.jeffkoons.com
Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Koons

10: Cindy Sherman

Photographer who often uses herself as a model in scenarios that parody stereotypes of women.

Tate entry: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/cindy-sherman-1938
MoMA entry: http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/cindysherman/
Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cindy_Sherman

15: Ai Weiwei

Artist and social activist

His website: http://aiweiwei.com
Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ai_Weiwei

Guardian article about recent exhibitions: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/sep/26/turner-prize-2014-ai-weiwei-blenheim-palace-week-art

16:  Gerhard Richter

Painter who sometimes paints over photos.

His website: https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/
Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Richter

44.  Theaster Gates

Does sculpture, installation, performance and "urban interventions".

His website: http://theastergates.com
White Cube entry: http://whitecube.com/artists/theaster_gates/
Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theaster_Gates
Guardian article: 
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/oct/06/theaster-gates-artist-latest-project-is-regenerating-chicago-artes-mundi

52: Yayoi Kusama

One of the most important living artists to come out of Japan.   She does painting, collage, sculpture, performance and "environmental installations", much of which uses psychedelic colours, repetition and pattern.

Daily Telepgraph article about a current exhibition at Victoria Miro

54: Thomas Hirschborn

Swiss artist that makes public "monuments" that make political statements out of low cost materials such as cardboard, packing tape and aluminium foil.   These are usually in run-down areas of cities and he gets the local community to help build them.

New York Times article: 

63: Rosemarie Trockel

German conceptual artist that often uses knitted wool in her work.



Wednesday 22 October 2014

Craft and Art

Antoine Leperlier gave another talk at college yesterday.  This time it was about art and craft  - how the two needed to be re-integrated and how this required making skills to be preserved and cultivated at a local level.

He's clearly a huge fan of Marcel Duchamp (who I've written about in previous posts).   Leperlier credits Duchamp with pioneering the separation of art and craft with his "readymades" - citing his "fountain" (urinal) and bottle rack.

 The bones of Leperlier's talk were that this could go too far.  With some works of art,  the person that comes up with an idea needs to be in control of its implementation.  You couldn't design something and send it off to be made in China because its artistic quality is bound up with lots of small design and process decisions - in other words, with the skill with which it's made.

That's clearly true for Leperlier's work.  He's spent a lifetime perfecting what he does, which includes opening the kiln and peeping inside to see that everything is going well.   In other words, he definitely needs to be there during the making process, even though he has an assistant (and at one stage had eight assistants).

I experienced a similar issue myself with the Devonport Column gate, where I came up with the concept and then worked with Art Metal (now called Formlite) to develop the detailed design and make it.   Throughout the project there were lots of detailed design decisions to make, some of them related to the way in which it was being made, so I needed to be there.

On the other hand, I don't know whether the integration of art and craft is always necessary.  What about designing something in 3D and then uploading the file to a 3D printing service to get it made?   Does this not count as art?

I should have asked this question to Leperlier!

Tuesday 21 October 2014

Skill and Snobbishness

Antoine Leperlier, a well-known French glass artist, visited Plymouth College of Art yesterday and gave an interesting talk about his work.

His focus is trying to capture time and one of the ways he does this is by including a bubble in a block of cast glass.  He says it's really tricky to catch the bubble as it rises through the block.

He seems to have avoided lots of failures by using the same size glass block, over and over again.  In that way, the basics are a given and he can focus on experimenting with what's inside the block - sometimes bubbles, sometimes other stuff including elements like ceramics that might behave unpredictably.

Antoine is in college for two days and soon after he arrived yesterday I had a chat with him and Glen Carter, our glass lecturer,  about my carrot project , which I was working on at the time.

We got to talk about whether and how I would join the two parts of my smaller piece.  Initially, I had intended to join them with UV glue but Antoine said I should bond them together by encasing them in plaster and heating them in a kiln.

He acknowledged that it would be risky but he said artists that knew their stuff would appreciate the skill in achieving this.  Glen agreed with him.

I was a little irked by this.  I think I'm playing to the gallery, as Grayson Perry would say, rather than trying to impress an elite.  On the other hand, I suppose I have to impress the elite if I want to be considered as one of them.

But do I?  Well, only in as much as I want to be recognised as an artist.  I don't want to get sucked into a snobbish world.

Later on, Antoine said UV glue would do a poor job.  You'd be able to see it and it would run down inside the hollow carrot.

Now that I care about!

I'll do some research into the technology of joining.

UPDATE:  I've chewed over this issue with technical types at Bullseye in the U.S..  They say that heating up the casts so the glass becomes tacky will result in me losing the surface definition of the hollow carrot, which I don't want to do.  

Bullseye recommends bonding the pieces together with a specific epoxy glue, Hxyal-NYL-1, which is widely used by art restorers because it's crystal clear and doesn't not yellow with age.

Sunday 19 October 2014

Gold Awards

Just to keep things tidy, here's a post about a competition I entered in March 2014, for "Gold Awards" for the Association of Colleges (AoC).

These awards are handed to high-achieving (famous)  graduates from colleges belonging to the AoC at a flash dinner in the House of Commons. 

Every year, the AoC invites students to come up with a design.  Plymouth College of Art's Jeff Norwood won it in 2013 with a sand-cast glass proposal.   

The AoC wanted 14 awards for 2014.  The brief stipulated that the design had to include the words "AoC Gold Awards 2014" and should incorporate "gold or gold colour" in the design.

As it happened, I'd made some trophies for my running club by pouring molten glass into a graphite mould into which I'd placed half a trophy cup in steel that I'd got Noah Taylor to turn on a lathe for me at Flameworks, the college metals workshop at the time.

Here's the outcome:


For more on how I made this please click on this link.

For the AoC awards,  I proposed doing the same thing but creating a hollow acorn inside the glass -  a reference to  "mighty oaks from little acorns grow" which seemed appropriate for the awards:


It didn't get anywhere and I didn't get any feedback apart from encouragement to try again in 2015.

Personally, I think the idea was good but the way I presented it, as a 2D drawing, let me down.  I didn't communicate the lovely circular surface ripples in the trophies I'd actually made, and really, the only way to do that was to make a prototype.

Since then, I've been trying to figure out how to create a steel half acorn so that I could make a prototype.  

I drew one using Rhino (3D modelling software) and got a quote for 3D printing it in "stainless steel" from i.materialise, a Belgian company offering 3D printing services.  From memory it was around £30, but I noticed that the printed "stainless steel" was laid down in a way that raised questions about its melting point - specifically whether it could withstand molten glass being poured on it, which comes out of the furnace at 1,000 degrees Celsius.

I asked i-materialise and was told that its stainless steel would start to soften at 700 degrees C, so I shelved the idea.

Later on, I discussed it with Ian Hankey, the lecturer in charge of the PCA's "Fab Lab" who suggested testing a piece of scrap from i.materialise.   In the end I bought a sample of printed stainless steel from them.




It's tiny!  That's my finger underneath it.  I plan to pour molten glass on it fairly soon.  I will remove my finger first!

I also need to experiment with sand blasting or engraving the oak leaves.  That's going to have to wait until I've finished my carrot project.

Saturday 11 October 2014

Tracey Emin

Interesting article by the Guardian's Jonathan Jones, who says Tracey Emin is "the most important British artist of her generation" and slags off Damien Hirst's paintings in the process:

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/oct/07/tracey-emin-review-the-last-great-adventure-is-you-white-cube-gallery-london

Her bed (which I haven't seen in the flesh) annoyed me, but maybe I need to get over this?   It sounds as though I should go and see Emin's show and get to know her other stuff a bit better.

Watch this space.


Saturday 4 October 2014

Abercrombie Awards

Another competition.  In this case, I got shortlisted, produced a prototype and then lost out to Adam Johns again, with Adam using a similar hot glass "egg" design to the one for the Building Forum award competition, covered in my previous post.


This was a competition staged by town planners in Plymouth City Council.

Patrick Abercrombie and James Paton Watson created the 1943 "Plan for Plymouth" after the city was effectively flattened in World War II.

The Abercrombie Awards are handed out every three years "celebrating the development and improvement of Plymouth's built environment".  This year, 10 awards are planned with the theme of "A Changing City".

 The brief came in a 20th August email and submissions had to be in sharpish, by 1st September.   Up to four artists were to be shortlisted and given £100 each to produce a prototype by 22nd September.  A winner would then get £1,300 to make 10 awards by 24th October.

In view of the short timeframe I decided to keep it simple and propose a design engraved on a piece of flat glass, mounted on another block of glass.

I started out trying to be clever and use parts of Abercrombie's Plan for Plymouth in the design but I couldn't make it work - it was too obscure.

I went back to basics.  I thought the award ought to be easily recognisable as Plymouth and ought to have some sort of reference in it to the Council's strategic plan to promote Plymouth as the "waterfront" city.  That led me on to Smeaton's Tower, a strong symbol of Plymouth, a seagull, a waterfront bird, and a view looking down from on high, which is the way town planners like Abercrombie often look at their work.



I proposed getting the awards made by Proto Studios, the outfit I worked with on the Derriford Hospital sculpture and I signalled a problem - I couldn't make the prototype myself until the college workshops opened on 29th September, a week after the deadline.

I got shortlisted and I sidestepped the issue by getting Proto to make the prototype:


In the end,  I lost out to Adam Johns with a proposal that was similar to his Building Forum "egg" ...



....but had "a skyline of buildings at the top" according to the organiser.

Once again, I would have picked Adam's proposal over mine.  

I don't envy Adam the task of producing 10 awards of this quality in a period of 3 weeks.  I would find it very stressful (even if I had Adam's hot glass skills).

The feedback I got was:
Peter Heywood’s was liked because looking at it, it immediately said “award” at the same time as incorporating Plymouth in the image. But this was the reason others also didn’t like it. Because the Abercrombie Awards are architectural awards and they wanted something “striking”.

Lessons

  • Hot glass beats engraving for awards, as I said in the Building Forum post.  I didn't think there was enough time for anybody to propose this.
  • I think I picked the best solution for me -  where I did the design and then handed over the production to Proto - bearing in mind the time constraints and my lack of engraving experience.
  • I think the design would have looked better with less deep-carved lines.  I didn't fully understand what was meant when discussing it beforehand with Proto
  • In different circumstances I might have tried to create the feathers on the seagull using a lathe.

Friday 3 October 2014

Building Forum Award

I think it's probably a good thing that I've been taken down a couple of pegs by failing to win any of the five of the competitions I entered during the summer.



I feel suitably chastened, although I'll carry on entering competitions whenever the opportunity arises - they're a great way of pushing myself and getting a brutal assessment of my work.  

This post is about the "Building of the Year" award for the Building Forum for Devon and Cornwall - one of two competitions signalled in  college email on 20th August.  

The brief did a lot of stipulating.  In particular, the award had to use the colours and shapes on the award page of the Building Forum website... 




 ...and it had to include the full names of the award and Forum.  The prize was £200.

The colour, shape and lettering requirements hemmed me in quite a bit.  Also, I didn't want to commit to anything that would be difficult, time-consuming or stressful to make in the fairly short timeframe - the deadline for completing the award was the end of October. 

Eventually, I hit on the idea of creating a geometric pattern from the shapes, using enamels.  In that way, I could send away for a decal of the design, apply it to a glass plate that I could buy for a few pounds, and then fire it.  Job done!



I don't feel too bad about losing this competition because the winner was Adam Johns,  a Plymouth College of Art graduate whose hot glass work I've seen and admired (see previous post).  Here's his design:


If I had been assessing submissions I would have picked this over my offering myself.

Adam used the same concept, with the same result (i.e. winning) for the Abercrombie Awards, the other competition in the college email mentioned earlier.  I'll write about that one in a separate post.

Lessons

  • I think my design was quite clever and quite striking given all the stipulations about what it should incorporate.
  •  I think its implementation on a bought-in plate was its weakness.   However,  it was right for me - I didn't want to be drawn into a complicated production process.  
  • It's tough to compete against hot glass for awards.  If you're capable ( as Adam is and I'm not) then it looks as though it's possible to produce a beautifully polished 3D item fairly quickly and thus cost effectively. 
  • Conventional cast glass is a non-starter for awards as I've discovered on previous projects - see the orienteering and running awards I made.  They take a long time to make, the materials are expensive and grinding/polishing can get stressful.  
  • I still think there's some potential in making awards by pouring molten glass into moulds - see my "simpler" running awards.  However I failed to win a competition using this approach for the Association of Colleges "Gold" awards earlier this year -  I'll write about it some time.

Thursday 2 October 2014

Devonport Column Merchandise

Another competion, another rejection!



This was for a gift shop item for Devonport Column, the monument in Plymouth for which I designed the gates - see more.


Here's the brief:
We are seeking an innovative, artistic and relevant design which represents the column project. Your design must be applied to a product which may be handmade (for example glass, ceramic items) or manufactured to house your design (for example tea towel or mug). You must consider the fact that the product needs to be saleable in a gift shop setting.

There is a budget of £1,200 to produce a limited edition range of the product. Please take this into account when submitting your entry to ensure that the product can be produced and will have a suitable retail price. If successful further items may be produced for sale.

Please email your design to alumni@pca.ac.uk including your name, CV, and a link to your website/online portfolio (if you have one). Your design must be accompanied with a statement of no more than 500 words describing your inspiration for the design and explaining the production of the piece.

Once shortlisted two the selected artists will receive £200 to produce a prototype in order to test the viability of the product, after which a winning design will be selected. Adjustments to the design may be requested at this point before identifying the chosen design. 

In early July 2014 I submitted 2 possible designs that could be engraved onto low cost lager or latte glasses.  I got a quote from an engraving company to do this for £3 per glass so long as there were more than 100 glasses.

Design A


This is an outline of Devonport Column when the glass is vertical/full and a telescope when it’s horizontal/empty. The telescope delivers a strong message about the great views from the top of the Column and also provides a maritime reference.


Design B


This etching is already used on the Column’s beer label.  I included it in case my telescope/column idea was considered too whacky.

A long silence ensued, in spite of me sending a couple of emails asking what was happening.  On 1st October, almost 3 months since my submission on 8th July, I was told:
None of the submissions we received were deemed strong enough to take forwards. I thought this had been communicated to you so I am sorry that this was not the case. We were looking for something a little more unique and innovative to mirror the project itself. 
I thought my telescope/column idea was unique, innovative and mirrored the project itself.  I suggested it could be developed but was told "we are not going to take this concept forward."

Lessons

So (as usual) I don't have much feedback to help me learn from my experiences.   But here's where I think I might have gone wrong:
  • I should have produced a more polished submission on a single design board rather than a couple of photos and a statement on a separate sheet.
  • I think the telescope/column idea has legs but it needed more development.  However, I didn't really have time to do this - the deadline was quite tight.
  • In a perfect world I should have shown what the finished product would look like - the engraving on the glass - but I couldn't see an easy way of doing this without actually engraving a glass with the design.  And that was supposed to be Phase 2 - shortlisted artists producing a prototype.





Tuesday 23 September 2014

Vantablack

Interesting interview on BBC4's Today program this morning - Anish Kapoor talking about Vantablack,  a nano-technology material that is said to be "the world's darkest material - so dark you can't see it".

Kapoor is working with this material and in the interview he says it has peculiar properties.  Because it absorbs light it creates a sort black hole that doesn't have a shape.  And Kapoor says that not having boundaries does funny things with our perception of time.

Sounds really interesting!

Here's a link to the  Today interview with Kapoor

Here's a link to an article about it in Dazed. 




Monday 22 September 2014

Energy from Waste Sculpture

Another competition for a large scale public sculpture that I entered over the summer.

I didn't even get shortlisted on this one which was quite a blow, even  though I keep on telling myself to manage my expectations on competitions.  I'm hoping this post will help me analyse where I went wrong.

Here's the background:  

MVV Environment Devonport Ltd, a company completing a huge energy-from-waste incinerator,  invited proposals for a work of art near the entrance to its facility, next to a busy road junction in Plymouth.

Here's some excerpts from the brief:
  • The artwork must be site-responsive and engage with the specific context of the location, community and those who will come into contact with the work.  
  •  Artists will consider the relationship of the site with local residents and the surrounding community. 
  • The site for the commission is not otherwise an area where contemporary art is located and artists should consider how their work will engage with this audience.
  • Artists should consider the context of the plant in terms of its commitment to green energy and carbon reduction.
The deadline for submissions was 30th June 2014.  Five artists were to be shortlisted and given £500 each to develop detailed designs.  The winner would then get £25,000 to create and install the work, with additional money for landscaping.  
I was shown around the site by Jane Ford, MVV's very helpful community liaison officer, who suggested using scrap or waste from the incinerator in the design.

As one might expect, there's been a lot of local opposition to the incinerator.  It's huge and although it will deliver a big reduction in Plymouth's carbon footprint I can understand people living nearby being worried about noxious fumes, smell, noise, and having a gigantic box blocking their view.

The location is really tricky.  Jane gave me a drawing showing the proposed base for the sculpture on the banks of the Camel's Head Creek, which is at the bottom of a 3 or 4 metre high bank next to a busy road junction.   

To my mind, this meant my design needed to achieve three key objectives:
  1. Get over the message that the plant was investing in the future - slashing Plymouth's carbon footprint and in that way, preserving the environment for future generations.
  2. Engage with the local community in a way that lets it move on from its opposition to the plant.
  3. Address 2 audiences - people driving past at road level (who won't see the bottom 3 or 4 metres of the sculpture)  and people on foot at creek level.
I came up with what I thought was a "killer" idea for Objectives 1 and 2.  A "future generation" was right there, in Weston Mill Primary School,  opposite the sculpture site, on the other side of the road junction.

I went to see the school's art coordinator, Jennifer Usborne, and came up with a scheme under which all 340 pupils would each paint a tile that I would then incorporate in my design.   I proposed combining this with a nature walk along the creek so the school could visit the sculpture and the area would become an attractive place for families to come and admire the handiwork of their little ones.

On Objective 3 - addressing audiences in cars on the road and on foot at a much lower level - my initial proposal was this:


I wasn't entirely comfortable with it.  I thought it looked a little ungainly, mainly because the "stalk" of dustbins was too thick.

Anyhow, I submitted it, along with a statement etc, on 24th June, the day before I set off for the New Designers show in London.   While I was there, I encountered this over the entrance of Westminster City School:


Scrap plastic bottles forming a giant seed-head!

I decided I should rethink my design and I eventually did this almost from scratch, coming up with this:



I'd asked Jane how I should re-submit my proposal and as a result  I sent this sketch and 2 other photos (the seed head and a mock up of the view from the road)  plus an "addendum".

A long silence ensued and I eventually heard that I hadn't been shortlisted on 16th September.  The feedback I got from Jane was as follows:

Your submission generated a lot of discussion, however it was felt that there were issues with scale in your proposal. The concept of working with the local primary school was a very positive aspect of your application. 

I suspect the scale issue had to do with the size of the dustbins in relation to the tallness of the masts but I couldn't get Jane to elucidate.

The five shortlisted designs are on the MVV website - here's links to them:
I'm  surprised that most of these designs take no account of the big difference in height between the proposed foundations at creek level and the road, particularly as the need to take account of the setting was spelled out in the brief.

However, there's some big lessons I can learn from this project:

Positives

  • The school idea was a cracker
  • I totally rethought the design when I encountered a new idea - a lesson from the Derriford Hospital project

Negatives

  • I should have produced a much more polished submission on a single design board. 
  • It would pay to get proficient at 3D modelling so I can make snazzier submissions  
  • I should have worked harder on developing a homogeneous design.  My submission was a collection of bits and pieces.
  • It was a mistake to submit before the deadline.  Having to submit an addendum  meant my submission was even more scrappy. 

UPDATE 1:  I went to a presentation by Jodie Bishop, public art officer at Plymouth City Council, on 8th October.   Lots to learn from the examples she gave, which included quite a bit about this project - she's on the selection panel.

Anyhow, Jodie made a big thing out of making sure you read the brief and address it, which prompted me to talk to her afterwards for a little whine.  I addressed the brief on this project and it was clear to me that some of the shortlisted artists hadn't!  I was misled by it!

Apparently, they are now talking about moving the whole idea to a different location - one that sidesteps the issues that had dictated my "two-level" design.  So I feel a little hard-done by.

A similar sort of thing happened on the Derriford sculpture project.  I spent a lot of time and effort making sure that my design was achievable only to discover that the alternatives were nowhere near as "developed" and that the selection process (so far?)  seems to have focused mainly on aesthetics and almost ignored the practicalities!

UPDATE 2:

The idea of getting pupils at local schools to paint tiles for something to do with the plant might get resurrected.  It might turn into objects on a nature trail through the woods.

UPDATE 3:

The winner ended up being a bell cast from scrap metal coming out of the incinerator, proposed by A Mackie (see link above).  

I think the idea was clever although the proposed support structure looked really ugly.  I understand that aspect has been redesigned.

As already noted,  the installation has also been shifted to a different location - one that sounds a lot less visible to passers-by.


Friday 19 September 2014

Derriford Sculpture


Over the summer I've entered five competitions, two of which have been for large scale public sculptures.

In this post I'm going to focus on the earlier one, the Organ Donor Recognition project for Derriford Hospital, and review the lesson/s learned from it.

This started as a college project.  All the students in the 1st and 2nd years of Contemporary Craft were asked to propose designs for one of various projects, one of which was for two sculptures and a seat for Derriford Hospital, to thank organ donors and inspire others to follow in their footsteps.

I  focused my effort on the larger sculpture, for the main entrance to the hospital, proposing a design that could be scaled down to suit the smaller sculpture in a courtyard.

 I came up with a general concept - hands reaching out to each other, appealing for and offering help, inspired by Michelangelo's "God creating Adam" painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Stage 1.

I proposed a very large (3m high by 1.2m wide) sheet of 25-mm-thick glass slump cast over a mould of the hands on a concave surface.  I cast a 1/10 model, pictured below:



 I was shortlisted, along with 3 other proposals, and I was asked to develop my ideas further, particularly in term of costs.

Stage 2.

I knew that the scale of my project meant that it would have to be made by a specialist - none of the kilns at college were big enough and the weight, about half a ton, meant special lifting equipment would be needed.   So I contacted Proto Studios, a company with a long track record of working on architectural glass projects, and I went to see them in Wiltshire.

David Proto told me that slump-casting was a non starter on safety grounds.  If someone was able to crack the sculpture (which would take some doing) it could fall on top of someone and kill them.   He proposed an alternative - deep sand-blasting the hands in a sheet of glass that could then be bent and toughened and bonded to a second bent and toughened sheet to create a laminated monolith.  It would  be almost unbreakable and if it did break, one side would shatter completely but be supported by the other side and stay in place, like a car windscreen.

David gave me a quote for doing this, so my second submission was now a practical proposition with realistic costs and a proposed contractor.

I made a 1/10 model, pictured below:



All the same, I wasn't too keen on the laminated monolith approach.  I'd wanted the whole thing to be much more 3D.  I'd liked the idea of the slump-casting in Stage 1 causing ripples in the glass that would catch light and convey the idea of energy, a life force, being passed between the hands.

As a result, my revised design boards suggested that the original idea might work in another material, such as one of the plastic alternatives to glass.

Not surprisingly, I was asked to look into this idea further, which I did quite extensively.  It was very interesting but I concluded it was a bit of a blind alley - the materials existed but very few companies had used them on large scale sculptures, the cost was probably going to be prohibitive and there were question marks over how the material would age.

Stage 3.

I didn't much like the laminated monolith idea and alternatives to glass had been a dead end, so I was at a bit of a loss.

Then I had a brainwave - a totally different way of implementing the same basic concept of the hands reaching out to each other.   This involved 3D modelling the whole project and then water-jet cutting up to about 100 relatively small pieces of glass and stacking them horizontally, threading them onto rods.

I discussed this idea with Formlite, the company I worked with on the gates for Devonport Column.  It was game to do the 3D modelling.

I discussed it with Proto Studios who agreed that it was a far less risky (and thus less costly) idea than the laminated monolith.  The water jet cutting could be done in a factory environment and transportation and assembly would be much easier because we would be dealing with relatively small, light pieces of glass.

Unfortunately, however, time was running out for submitting this idea. I didn't have time to do a 3D scan of hands and arms or get Formlite to create a proper 3D computer model of a prototype.  

I ended up designing it in 2D on my computer and having to draw sections of the hand almost by guesswork.  Still, I managed to generate a file that I could feed into the college laser cutter to make about 40 pieces from a couple of 3-mm-thick acrylic sheets - see photo below:


I then threaded the pieces onto two threaded rods, spacing them apart by 3mm with washers.  This created a 1/5 model of part of my proposed sculpture:



Photos of my design boards for Stages 2 and 3 are on my website - click on this link to see them.

I and the other shortlisted candidates presented our ideas to the estates department of Derriford Hospital on 12th May.    I took along all my design boards and three models.

Unfortunately, the room at Derriford was very gloomy and as a result, the hand in my Stage 3 model didn't stand out as well as it might.  Also, it would have looked a lot better if I had been able to do a 3D scan of an actual hand, and if I had been able to do a 3D design of the whole project, rather than my rough-and-ready approach using a 2D drawing package.

This might sound a bit big-headed but my proposals were much more developed than the others.  I had discussed it in depth with companies that would help me design and build it so I knew it was a practical proposition.  The other proposals weren't much more than ideas that still needed a lot of development in terms of determining whether they were build-able, whether they were safe, whether they were weather-proof,   how much they would cost, what scales they should be, and so on.

Anyhow, the estate staff voted on the proposals and I came second.

I wonder whether I would have been better off trying less hard.   If I had stuck with my original proposal I could have "discovered" the safety problem later on if I had won  - and it would have put me on equal footing with the other candidates.

Having said that,  the proposal that came first was a clever idea and John Grayson, our course leader, balanced some positive comments on my proposal with a negative - that "the design concepts were rather derivative in nature".

I questioned this - see my previous post - and I've mulled over what he meant ever since.  John wasn't available to give me more than a one-sentence email as feedback.

 I've ended up seeing his point or view concerning one aspect of my design - the panel concept.   The switch to making the sculpture as a stack of horizontal glass plates gave me the opportunity to make a much more interesting and dynamic shape.  I wish I'd taken it, but the way the competition was structured meant that I tried to stick with the design idea that had been shortlisted.  Also, the timescale was tight, particularly as models were involved,  so I didn't really have the opportunity to go back and think things through from scratch.

As it happens, I subsequently encountered a sculpture that uses horizontal glass plates in a similar way to what I'd been planning.  The outcome was stunning - see the photo below.  It made me realise what I could have done, with more time,  in Stage 3.






I assumed that coming second in the voting at Derriford meant that I was out of the running on this project but when I voiced this opinion to John Grayson in July he replied:  "The final decision has not been made".

So who knows: maybe they'll be a Stage 4?    I would love the to opportunity to develop  my Stage 3 design some more, but I doubt whether this is going to happen.

Lessons


  • Consider how and by whom proposals are going to be assessed.  The chances are they will be artists evaluating the aesthetics rather than engineers reviewing practicalities.  If this is the case focus on appearance rather than substance.
  •  Look at who else has been invited to submit proposals.  Adjust the aesthetic/practicality balance of your own efforts accordingly.
  • If you make a big shift in the way you plan to implement a concept then go right back to the beginning and see whether new opportunities have emerged.




Thursday 17 July 2014

Derivative?

In an assessment of my work for a competition to design a sculpture for the entrance of Derriford Hospital,  John Grayson (our course leader) listed some positives and then balanced them against what I assume was meant to be a negative, namely:  "The design concepts were rather derivative in nature."

I emailed John for clarification and got a one liner back, saying: "derivative in terms of source e.g. 'Creation of Adam' and in terms of the panel concept."

I'm not complaining but I'm puzzled by the use of the word "derivative" and it's negative connotation on a number of counts:
  • What's wrong with being derivative?
  • Isn't everything derivative anyhow?
  • What's the difference between being derivative and including references to masterpieces in your work?   
  • What proportion of viewers would "get" the references anyhow? 

Friday 27 June 2014

New Designers

Yesterday I went to New Designers 2014, an exhibition in London's Business Design Centre where art colleges show off the best stuff made by students in their final year.

I've organised and attended a lot of boring trade shows in my working life so I needed some  convincing that going to New Designers was worthwhile.

It was!   The quality of a lot of the work on show was really high, it was great to talk to graduates about their work and I came away from the show with lots of ideas for future projects.

A lot of the show was taken up with textiles and jewellery (not my thing, really) but there was still enough glass, ceramics, metalwork and other stuff to keep me interested all day.

Here's a list of the stuff I looked at, in the order in which I encountered it.

Sophie Southgate.  Hemispheres with different geometric hollows cut out of them.  Just loved the texture on the outside surface.  Must find out how to do this!


 Christina Bolt.  Worn bricks etc that she "repairs" with gold leaf etc.   Made me think about using worn brick, glass etc from the beach.

Arthur Goodfellow  Ceramic boxes, probably slip cast, that he distorts while they're still plastic.

Emilia Netto   Interesting experiments pouring molten pewter into a silicon mould (from Tiranti) that can withstand that sort of heat

Amber King  Great idea!  Putting stuff between 2 sheets of glass to form a panel.  Amber smashed up bubbles she'd blown but other things would look good, too.  And you could use redundant double glazing frames!

Susan Ratcliff  Clever ways of adding glass to existing objects - cameras, old garden tools - to express some deeply held emotions.  The bubbles had images of an old eye infirmary etched on to them - was something about sight.


Steph Sykes.  A hot glass project that reminded me of my "Faces" one - i.e. dozens of clones.


Rita Griskonyte  Cast glass.  Modelled people in clay. Then smashed up the model and made a cast glass version of the result.

Terri Harper  Screen that incorporates post cards and other memorabilia about one of Terri's ancestors (great grandmother?)  who had an exciting life spanning two World Wars.

Ainsley Francis  Incorporating lenses into objects and doing a lot of lathe work in glass to create "camera obscura" effects, dealing with identity issues.   

Charlotte Smith Blows big bubbles onto logs with cut outs in them.  The signs of burning are hidden under the glass.

Faith Mercer  Studied the beauty of mould at a microscopic level by working with microbiologists at her college.  Translated some of the textures into glass and used them inside some blown objects.  I really like the idea of looking at living organisms at a microscopic level and replicating them on a large scale.  A follow up for me.

Richard T Roberts  Nice cast glass.  Wondered how he got all the plaster out of this one:

Emma Vaughan  Laser cut layers of copper, perspex, plywood etc.  Also had an enormous copper "necklace" on show.  I really liked her layer type wall hangings replicating the patterns made by water on sand:  


Diane Soltys.  Loved her rather ghoulish piglets:

William Rolls  Lovely ceramic dogs, full of life.  I didn't get to talk to William.


Chloe Georgakis  Very interesting stuff on growing crystals and generating electricity, inside organic looking glass shapes, so that it's "living art".  Might be an idea for the sustainability assignment I have to do in the future.  You could have a debate about whether this is really art.


Danae Dasyra Another display looking like a lab experiment, this time showing a sort of mobile based on elementary type electric motors.  Unfortunately it works on a voltage that wasn't permitted in the exhibition, so it wasn't operating.  Another idea for the sustainability assignment?



Jenny Ayrton  Sand-cast glass with lovely inclusions in them.


Kensuke Nakata exploring Japanese stoicism by making thousands of porcelain petals in a simple way, tingeing them with colour, and then assembling them on stacked circular kiln shelves.


A very productive day.  I'll return next year.