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

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.

Her website: http://www.yayoi-kusama.jp/e/information/

Biography: http://www.yayoi-kusama.jp/e/biography/

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

Tate entry: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/kusama-the-passing-winter-t12821

Daily Telepgraph article about a current exhibition at Victoria Miro

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/11059373/Yayoi-Kusama-to-exhibit-in-London-at-85-the-ideas-just-keep-coming.html

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: 

 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/26/arts/design/a-visit-to-thomas-hirschhorns-gramsci-monument.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

63: Rosemarie Trockel

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

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

MoMA entry: http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=5933

Tate entry: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/rosemarie-trockel-2066

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.