You are currently browsing the monthly archive for November 2009.
The Garland has been growing…it is interesting to see how audiences have got so involved in Shane Waltener’s installation and during my most recent visit I was fascinated by the way the piece had unfolded. As a maker my practice is driven by process and so seeing Garland or Amy Houghton’s typewriter piece being engaged with keeps the process and exhibition alive in exhilarating and at times completely unexpected and exciting ways.
Caroline Juby and Russell Martin, Friday 13 November 2009
“Life’s too short”
Considering time in an expanded sense, and looking at alternative practices as a way to reconsider contemporary craft, this dialogue is with and Caroline Juby, a PhD researcher in the geography department of Royal Holloway, University of London, who I contacted after reading an article she had written for the London Archaeologist. I had assumed her practice – specialising in the Paleolithic past of London – is experienced in a very different way to most crafts makers, but there were subtle similarities, such as the way touch can provide access to different cultures and modes of thought, and an extension of the object’s existence past the lifetime of the practitioner.
Her dialogue, one of the longest one to one dialogues in the project, covers a huge range of topics, including:
- Climate change as an ongoing phenomenon spanning thousands of years
- Where modern peoples fit in the ‘narrative’ of history
- Haptic methodologies of experience and community
- The human species as one amongst many, simply trying to survive
- How even very ancient objects continue to accrue meaning and significance through the biographies and provenance of their owners
- The need for opportunism by the archaeological community in London
The dialogue took place in the Museum of London, which hosts the exhibitionLondon before London on London’s Paleolithic past. We also reference the October 2009 In Our Time Radio 4 programme on the Geological Formation of Britain.
Visit this page to listen to their conversation…
Sue Lawty will be running a free, drop in Family Art Workshop this weekend.
In the Waterhall Seminar Room, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery
14 November from 11am
15 November from 1pm
Natural Order
Every living thing has specific individual qualities of form, colour and texture.
We will explore rhythmic design and pattern using natural materials like leaves, twigs and seed heads…
Each pattern will be photographed before being dismantled and a gallery of ideas gradually built up over the week end.
Repeatedly using the same marks allows refreshing freedom and non-precious attitude to drawing and design work.
A number of the artists and makers in the exhibition have been commissioned to make new works. I will focus on each of the artists and their new works in a series over the next month…beginning with Sue Lawty.
These works can also be found in the exhibitor pages…
Calculus
2009
2 x 3 m
natural stone on gesso
(photo credit: John Coombes)
Calculus Sue Lawty
“…To see a World in a Grain of Sand…”
William Blake
I wanted to take something tiny & insignificant; very small stones unnoticed underfoot on beach, out of context… and through repetition and scale of work,
subject the viewer to be made small in their presence.
Each tiny insignificant speck of stone bears witness to the vastness of geological time. Time so immense it renders us, humankind, as the real speck;
ourselves an insignificant blip in the earth’s history.
The original rock would have been formed and then subsequently broken down and eroded over millions of years. Each resultant gravelly mark of stone
has been rumbled and rolled, tossed and turned, pounded and shoved relentlessly in and out on tides twice a day, every day for years… until now…
halted on the verge of becoming sand.
Calculus:
- the study of change in the same way that geometry is the study of shape and algebra is the study of equations
- a branch of mathematics originally based on the summation of infinitesimal differences.
- a particular method / system / logic of calculation or reasoning
- Latin for small stone
You can read more from Sue on her blog
the exhibition designers hyperkit who have done a fantastic job designing the identity for all the graphic elements of the project, the catalogue and the exhibition design.
Visit their website to find out more about the identity that they created for us.
from the hyperkit website
from the hyperkit website
To Russell Martin for the Analogue project. It has added enormous content to the blog and thinking around the subject. Russell has just uploaded some recordings from the past weekend when we visited Birmingham…read the latest conversation here
will be uploaded on the takingtime.org blog but in the meantime a little taster from Carl Honore
I am currently updating the blog with information about the exhibition and the artists involved.
sorry if this causes any confusion…while pages move and things get sorted – but I am hoping that it will all be slightly easier to navigate once it is done.
Now that the exhibition is up and running the blog will act as a my main space to think through the exhibition’s subject matter and thoughts around slowness, time and contemporary craft. In the meantime if you would like to contribute a post you can either leave a comment or email me at makingaslowrevolution@googlemail.com
I thought it would be good to think through the fact that one of the most challenging things I have had to deal with during the research, development and launch of the exhibition has been the perception that the exhibition and subject matter is about a literal slowing down…I have pasted a piece below from my introduction in the catalogue that I hope gives some thought to this.
I was talking to Ben Lignel yesterday about think tank’s next subject which is up for debate: Speed. I am really looking forward to reading their essays on the subject. Being a very speedy maker working quickly and intuitively – I am very interested how makers think this through – through making as well as through words. On that note I am working with David Clarke, David Gates and Lin Cheung on a new project Intelligent Trouble – more of that to come soon!
‘…What became increasingly important to me over the duration of the research were notions of time and how ideas of time, timeliness, timelessness and being in ones own time seemed to offer a thread and dialogue through the subject matter of the exhibition. We had used the term Slow Revolution from the beginning – it always seemed a pertinent phrase to use but not in a simplistic or obvious way. I like the word slow in terms of its time connotations, that you can think through slow and it gives you an angle to think through ‘fast’ for example and that slow could not and does not mean the same to all. Quick, quick, slow – the spaces made, rhythm and tempo, the different durations thought through and as a maker the resonance between these spaces created in my working practice. The word revolution also seems apt… the crafts can offer certain ideologies and certainly a space for free thinking that is perhaps in some senses revolutionary but also it offers us a sense of movement, that we are turning, revolving around and around – evolving.
The makers in the exhibition are not literally slow, they are not all counting second by second the time it takes to make their work, and they are not interested necessarily in skill for its own sake. But through their work and thinking they offer the space for others to interact and become immersed in time. Asking what the work means or offers in the wider context of a global space in time: where stuff comes from; why it’s here; how it links us to others; what is left in the traces and marks of what we do and why this is important are some of those things.
Thinking about time literally – we construct our own sense of time by comparing events – where things happened or when and how they relate to our lives. Through this we perceive a sense of relativity and consciously feel the passage of time. The objects in the exhibition are imbued with the marks of their maker and their lives and those that come into contact with them. By putting the work of these nineteen artists, makers and designers together in the same place I hope some sort of layered sense of time will happen through the likeness or unlikeness, the overlapping, the spaces in between and the quietness that ensues…’
The catalogue is available at a cost of £8 through Chrome Yellow Books, Contemporary Applied Arts, London and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.
Hooray!!!
Neil Brownsword has won the British Ceramic Biennial One-Off Award…read more here and an extract from the website is below…
‘At the halfway point of the festival and with over 10,000 visitors already through the doors, an invited group of 300 dignitaries from the city and the world of ceramics came together to celebrate the very best in new ceramics. Turner-Prize winning ceramicist, artist and author Grayson Perry was the special guest at the gala, as the winners were awarded a total of £40,000. And guests from the Potteries could cheer as local artist Neil Brownsword deservedly took the One-Off Award. The Award exhibition continues until the very end of the festival on 13 December’
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