12.10.13 - Victoria Miro & Parasol Unit

Two very exclusive and hidden gems were uncovered this weekend with my first ever visit to the Victoria Miro gallery and the uncovering of the Parasol unit. On route between Angel and Old street these two open warehouse galleries feature magnificent spaces, white walls, polished concrete floors and an original timber warehouse roof. Although two separate galleries they are next door and the building is looked upon as one. The building also has a garden that although weather granted wasn't the most graceful experience this weekend, on a good day you could spend an hour or two there.

The Victoria Miro was showcasing Idris Khan's third solo show entitled "Beyond the black"  A show that featured Khans extensive approach to dealing with black on black, producing work on large aluminum panels with black pigment. His work focuses on repetition of text, taken previously from references and writings from the likes of Agnes Martin & Jean-Paul Satre, however his new found pieces incorporated his own writing, stamped excessively on top of one another until a mountain of black in shade covers the panels. Khan's work discloses the underlining aspect of "birth of tragedy" as a theme and his large painting truly surface that both in scale and colour. It made me think about Damien Hirst "Black sun" with the dominance and use of black to adsorb the audience. I have been looking to forward to seeing his work in the flesh with a new vis com project "White" that I will be delivering next term deals with similar aspects. Idris Khan will be a great reference into dealing with one colour outcomes and how one can communicate that to an audience. 

The Parasol unit featured the work and extensive collection of "Siah Armajani" with his show "An ingenious would". Siah Armajani is internationally renowned for his work relating to American architecture, focusing on structure IE bridges, openings and general forms that question the appropriation of space. The gallery not only had some of his most iconic works on display but upstairs featured a luxury model room, showcasing Siahs's 68 piece collection. These models were a reflection of studio processes and development, built out of card, matchsticks and balsa wood. By studying each you were able to delve into the artists head embracing the thoughts on balance, angles and overall emotion that his work inhabited. 

I'm very glad to have come across this little unit and look forward to seeing what else they have to offer in the new year. The Victoria Miro gallery is one of three spread across London, each with a different exhibition on show. I believe this could be my next journey.

 

12.10.13 - Islington Contemporary Art & Design fair (Casabi Designs)

This weekend I shot up on the tube to Islington to visit my old work colleague and designer friend Chloe Smith aka Casabi designs who had her impressive range of contemporary glassware on display for sale. Chloe has been producing innovative and creative glass concepts since graduating from Loughborough University a few years ago, focusing on elegance, beauty and the natural phenomenon that is glass. 

Known for her shard glass bowls that feature one colour or an overlay, she has now designed a new range of bowls that feature long intricate strands of glass. These new products can act either as a functional product to any home or mounted on a wall as a piece of art. Although complex in process and production, her work portrays a minimalistic quality whilst visually demonstrating the light absorbing qualities that glass has to offer. The fair was filled with young designers, many who worked within jewellery or textile design. One of Casabi's iconic bowls was even featured on the promotional flyer and artwork for the Candid Arts Trust showcasing the talents of Chloe's design work. It was great on a personal level to have a catch up and discussing her new ideas and recent works especially with some of my students having an interest in this area of design.

CASABI designs has a wide range of products on offer, each individual to the owner in colour and design. Chloe is also open to commissions and bespoke orders that seem to be the main attraction of her work whilst I was stood by her side at the fair.

09.10.13 - The Big Draw

The Big Draw is a national event that has taken place for many years now, the idea is simple, get the nation drawing and to appreciate how creative and fun drawing can be. With this discipline at the heart of our professional practice the UAL Foundation Diploma team decided to put on an event that would combine the act of drawing with a team building exercise involving other students from various art course within the college. The Big Draw sets an underlining theme as a basis for inspiration and this year was no different, with "Draw Tomorrow" being set as the 2013 challenge.

Taking this theme into consideration and with our recent trip to the V&A to visit the "Memory palace exhibition", we wanted to build upon the identity of future cities, what would our cities be like in the near future? What eccentric architecture and new found abstract forms would exist?  and how futuristic would we become? The event was split into 3 parts, with an outgoing and influential talk form Maria Swepson about capturing and drawing architecture and looking into the work of some of the icons that use drawing as a fundamental to their design process, Will Alsop, Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry to mention a few. We then stepped out into the atrium where in teams the students had to design, create and build completely out of paper (something that we set as a challenge itself) Once all the individual pieces of architecture had been built, arranged and combined together to portray a future city scape, we could begin the draw. 

The afternoon was filled with creativity energy, engagement and the students definitely got an experience, the work produced was a fantastic standard and with over 120 students taking part, it was great to see such a large space within the college finally get used for something worth while. We are now in the process of filling out our application to be nominated for an award where by the big draw has taken place within a educational establishment dealing with students and pushing the process of drawing. I would love more than anything for the students to receive the recognition they so simply deserve, and look forward to the Big Draw 2014. 

29.09.13 - Sound of the week

For this weeks sound of the week, I bring you a tech-house inspired track by artist EDA entitled "Love Worn". I heard this recently on Defected's new album "Loco Dice in the house" that has been on repeat every day in the studio and in the car. Enjoy

27.09.13 - Open evening 2nd October 2013

Just to let you all know that South Essex College will be hosting its first of the new academic year open evening on Wednesday 2nd October. This is a great opportunity to come and look at the Foundation Diploma in Art & Design course and discuss your future intentions with further education.

25.09.13 - Sky Arts Ignition: Memory palace

On Wednesday the Foundation Diploma team made its way up to the iconic Victoria and Albert museum to see one of the most talked about exhibitions over the past months. Memory palace brought to us by Sky Arts is an exhibition adapted from the novel written by Hari Kunzru. To give you a brief overview of the story, the novel depicts a time many years from now, where a magnetic storm has destroyed the worlds technology infrastructure and all the information associated with this. 

The narrator of the story is set to be part of a secret group and it is this foundation that the exhibition sets up to explore. A collaboration of illustrators, painters, graphic designers and installation artists each responded to part of the story where the narrator starts to talk about his memories and recalls partial information. The exhibition allows for complete escape form the real world and allows you to start to think rather deeply about how we in this day and age rely so heavily on technology and where we store our information. Its was an amazing exhibition with a rich eclectic take from each of the artists and designers. 

Small in size yet overwhelmingly powerful and as an audience you feel trapped in his story wanting to read every chapter to create the bigger picture. The exhibition finishes with a memory wall, a digital installation where the audience can write and sketch out their own single memories that can be viewed on a large screen within the exhibition, not only that but on a weekly basis the walls are printed out and installed within the exhibition given new audience members an insight into who has been. On until the 20th October I would advise you all to go and see this. Having worked on projects before where students have responded and adapted to bodies of text and novels it was great to finally see this type of work in a gallery produced by some of the worlds leading contemporary artists and designers.

The day also gave us an opportunity to visit club to catwalk, a fashion design exhibition with an insight into the links between social affairs, the 80's as a genre and classic age and the influence within fashion at this time. A bonus also was that the students were booked into the fantastic educational facilities at the museum to give an informal presentation about what they had found interesting to date, this was a great start to presentation techniques and bringing the groups closer together in giving constructive criticism and peer support.

 

23.09.13 - 360 "half way stage"

Now at its half way point, I thought this would be an opportunity to post up some info about what I have been running as my specialist pathway project as part of 360. 360 is 4 week long rotational project designed to enable students to move around each of the specialist pathways and to ultimately get their fingers wet in as many creative disciplines as possible. As visual communications pathway leader I have produced a series of design based tasks to open them up to the ideas of what visual communication could be about. I didn't want to approach the brief with stereo typical design brief IE: poster, typography, packaging but instead I wanted to extend the challenge by giving them something that hopefully they had never considered. 

My approach was to get them to explore conditional design and the act of creating work under rules and notions of processes rather products. It is a tricky one to explain "especially if you are a fan of definitive outcomes". The series of tasks delivered responded to the conditional design handbook I had read over the summer, I felt that this angle allowed the students to engage with the design process, and that journey of development that led to refinement rather than a single idea and execution "something that seems to happen when your at college". All the tasks started off as a series of drawing games, in groups where each had its own set of conditions. Some games were fast paced, and other took various approached in remembering the rules of the game that you had to strictly follow. Although the outcomes are preset to a certain degree, you could very rarely if ever produce as identical outcome, and this got them consider about being responsive, individual and unique about how you could approach design briefs. 

Below are some pictures of the processes being performed, they do not look like anything in particular "again its process driven not product led" The team who created the series of conditional design tasks are a real inspiration and I would recommend a look into their thesis, ideas and influences.

15.09.13 - Sound of the week

Known for always having music on in the studio to build an energy and momentum, Ive decided that each week for the ongoing academic year I am going to upload what I deem the sound of the week. This weeks selected track is "Plastic People" by Four Tet.

11.09.13 - Creative Cups

So have you ever wondered what would happen if you asked 77 students to bring in between 300-500 plastic cups? well the answer is simple; a shit load of cups, but the next question is what do you do with these cups?

As part of the students 1st brief "Recall" I wanted them to think about their childhood memories, things they got up to, pictures they drew, things they built. In particular I wanted them to discuss the identity of a child's den, a place where you could escape "solo or with a friend. As a summary to the week I wanted them to be creative and responsive by working collectively in groups to use their only material "Cups" to build a den. 

Since I have been at South Essex it has been a traditional activity within the induction phase that the foundation students design and build and space, it has always been out of cardboard and paper. I wanted this year with a new team to create a rather refreshing take on this, an with a material that students could get hold of at a reasonable cost.  Now it may sound bizarre and ridiculous, Click here to see my references. Some may even say whats the point! but the identity of the UAL Foundation Diploma is that students will be opened up to a range of different tasks and working with a variety of random media. The activity was  a great success with four initial groups focusing on one particular part ie: Front, middle, back, and them combining these in an effort to make a suitable and structurally sound den that they could then inhabit and escape form the world. 

Lets just say I went home happy after this activity, enough said on that note, as the photos truly capture the moment.

 

09.09.13 - UAL Foundation Induction

So this week we met the new faces that are the 2013/14 UAL Foundation Diploma students. From the word go we could see some real enthusiasm and as a team we discussed how promising this year group looked already. As with any induction it was an opportunity for the students to meet not only the team but their peers and to start getting familiar with everyone's different personalities and attributes, you could already see small social groups formed within the 1st hour, yet everyone was happy to work with different people for all the tasks. 

The Chinese students students have also had a real shock, thrown into a room with 70 odd unfamiliar faces, in an unfamiliar building in a different country. Credit to them all, in that by the end of the session they had already started to show some confidence. This is bound to take time (I know I would be freaked out on my 1st day if studying in a foreign country). I am confident that in time we will start to see them flourish as young creatives and with the help of the team and academic support staff, once the language barrier is broken we can really start connecting with them. 

The day held some interesting activities showing great team work and creating a brand an name for ourselves within the building. The two induction activities we run on the day witnessed students creating sculptures entirely out of paper and influenced by conjoined verbs (Based on the work of Richard Serra). Another activity was blind sculptures where individuals selected a word and attempted to make a sculpture out of plasticine capturing the word, the difficulty was that they had to in fact make the sculpture with their hands behind their backs. Overall I would a highly inspiring, successful yet draining day, now to learn 77 new names, faces and talents.