Entry: Free
The Victoria Miro is not very welcoming to passers-by. There are no windows at the front and the door, which also lacks windows, is kept shut. To get in you have to press a buzzer. It's definitely somewhere you have to intend to go rather than somewhere you might just visit because it looks interesting as you walk past. If I hadn't been told about the current exhibition by a work colleague I would have missed out on it completely.
If you're looking for another opportunity to drink some mulled wine and shop for handmade Christmas gifts, I'll be selling my work at the Morley Winter Fair this Sunday.
The fair is being held at Morley College on Westminister Bridge Road and is open from 11:30am to 3:30pm. Entry is free so if you're in the area come along and check it out!
I've been meaning to write something about Nobrow Press for months and the release of the latest issue of their magazine, (also called Nobrow), seems like a good time to finally do so. I found Nobrow by accident. For several months I walked past their Great Eastern Street shopfront on my way to and from work. The shop was always closed at the times I walked past it, but on the blinds was a procession of monsters carrying shopping bags. It was such a fun and unusual image that I eventually made the effort to get there when it was open.
Entry: Free
A new gallery – the ICN Gallery – has just opened on Leonard Street, with a mission to show “new works which use Japanese culture and sensibilities as their base”. I missed its first exhibition, but managed to catch Ohako, its current show, last week.
Apparently, ohako means two things in Japanese: it can refer to a person's best skill or to a box for preserving tea leaves. For this show 30 Japanese artists working in a variety of disciplines were each given a tea box and asked to use it to showcase their best skill – an ohako inside an ohako.
I've been looking around for simpler sewing projects after this disaster and recently found this tutorial on Craftster for turning a men's shirt into a tank top. This turned out to be an excellent beginner project with a straightforward tutorial. My only complaint would be that it isn't quite clear from the tutorial where you should cut to remove the shirt collar.
I picked up this short-sleeved men's shirt from a local charity shop. I chose it because I liked the subtle skull print on it, but with hindsight I should have considered the size and the type of material more carefully. It's 100% cotton, but it's quite stiff and doesn't drape very well. It also turned out to be far too large for me.
If I were doing this again I'd use a medium, or even a small, shirt. This was a large and it's definitely too loose for my taste. It also sits too low and is slightly see-through; I'm wearing a vest underneath it in the picture below.
You can see more from the designer on her blog.
Power of Making has been jointly organised by the V&A and the Crafts Council to promote the idea that making things is awesome, an idea that already has my full support leaving me slightly at a loss as to what to say about it. It's not really about making anything in particular, or using a certain material or technique, it's just all about how great it can be to learn a skill and apply it to make interesting things.
King Silver Gorilla by David Mach
Entry: Free
The E17 Art Trail is currently taking place in Walthamstow. This annual festival is organised by local artists and makers to promote their work, which is displayed in local businesses until 11th September. There are 157 venues altogether, though some of them, such as Walthamstow Library, are hosting more than one exhibition.
With so much going on there's definitely something for everyone. However, each venue on the trail is open at different times and on different days, so if there are specific things you want to see you may have to make several trips to catch them all. Even if you don't go for anything in particular, but just take the paper guide and explore, you can expect to spend a lot of time flicking through it trying to work out which exhibitions are open on a particular street. I suspect that it's easier if you download the guide as a phone app, but I lack the technology to confirm this.
There are walking and cycling tours, though they don't cover all of the venues, and there are various workshops, activities and performances taking place in addition to the exhibitions. Honestly, if you live in the area you have no excuse not to stop by and see something. Walthamstow was one of the places in London affected by last month's riots so it's good to see something positive happening there instead.
Entry: £7 adults / £5 children (5-16 years) / £16.50 family (2 adults + 2 children)
There's a secret nuclear bunker about a 45 minute drive from my home.
Entry: Free
The British Museum is currently showing three Australian exhibitions: "Baskets and Belonging - Indigenous Australian histories"; "Out of Australia - prints and drawings from Sidney Nolan to Rover Thomas"; and "Australia Landscape - Kew at the British Museum". I went along yesterday to planning to just see “Baskets and Belonging”, but as it happens that exhibition can only be reached by going through the “Out of Australia” show. It seemed silly not to take the time to look around both exhibitions, so this has ended up being a double review.
Last November I wrote about Tactile, one of my favourite art books. Not long after that I was actually given its sequel, Tangible: High Touch Visuals, as a present and I've been meaning to write something about it ever since.
Unfortunately, I've been stymied by my inability to write good reviews of things I like. It's hard to know what to say beyond “it's really good, I recommend it”, particularly when, like Tangible, it's a sequel that is almost identical to the original. So, Tangible is more of the same – design that has a physical presence, whether sculpture, installation, product design or costume. This time around the chapters are: Out of the Box; Imitation and Mimicry; Altered Identities; Object and Application; Spatial Compositions; and Public Intervention. Also, the page of text that introduces each chapter now incorporates the chapter title into an image, a fun touch, which hints at a very slightly higher budget this time around.
It's really good, I recommend it! Much like Tactile, I feel like I find new things every time I look through it. Current favourites are Magdalena Bors' strange landscapes, Christian Tagilavini's paper costumes and Joshua Allen Harris' inflatable creatures placed over New York subway air vents.
I do have one question for publisher Die Gestalten, though.
For my birthday my parents – who to the best of my knowledge account for two thirds of the regular readers of this blog – bought me a new sewing machine: a Janome 7025 from John Lewis.
Entry: Free
I try to write exhibition reviews the day I see the exhibition. In the past I've found that if I put off writing the review for longer than 48 hours I end up never writing it at all. Usually if I put off writing a review it's just because I'm too busy, but sometimes I put it off because I'm not really sure what to say, as was the case with Taryn Simon's photography exhibition, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters. I went to see this on Wednesday, and since then I've been thinking about it almost non-stop without really coming to a conclusion about it.
I was looking online for examples of realistic knitted anatomy when I found this pattern on Knitty. Over the last couple of weeks I knitted my own in the hope that it would help me when I come to design a heart for my final piece.
I recently purchased some watercolours and, as it's been so long since I did any watercolour painting, I'm going to do a regular feature that I'm calling “Watercolour Wednesday”.
As both the Textiles Foundation group and the Advanced Textiles group are currently preparing for their end of year exhibitions, the college has suddenly run short of the frames needed to make printing screens. James kindly made me two brand-new frames using some cheap wood from B&Q, so all of my new screens are now ready for printing.
Entry: Free
The Wellcome Collection's current big exhibition is Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life, which runs until 31st August. It's the most information-heavy exhibition I've seen at the Wellcome Collection and it makes very good use of the available space. I'm actually surprised by how much content the curators have managed to pack into the room.
A tiny skull! Thanks, Tina! We thought it was a rat skull at first, but after looking online I now think it might be a rabbit skull.
Entry: Free
I hadn't heard of the Grant Museum of Zoology until quite recently, when I learnt that it was reopening in March after a period of refurbishment. I went along yesterday, surprised that there was still a collection of skeletons in London that I hadn't seen.
The Grant Museum was founded at University College London in 1827. Last year it closed for an eight month period in order to move to new premises in the university's Rockefeller Building on University Street. Apparently it's “the only remaining university zoological museum in London”, so presumably there used to be more of these amazing places.
I don't think I can rave about it enough after my brief visit. There are hundreds of cabinets and shelves and draws, all stuffed with skeletons and taxidermy and specimens preserved in jars. It's just one big room crammed with tributes to humainty's need to understand and categorise everything. Everywhere there's something to marvel at: owls in bell-jars; a complete quagga skeleton; a jar full of moles.
While I was allowed to take photographs provided I turned the flash off, I did tell the curator that I wasn't going to put them online. Possibly I should have pleaded the case for sharing a couple of them, because it's a shame to not be able to illustrate this post.
Anyway, if you're in London on a weekday afternoon with no money and an enquiring mind then this is somewhere you should definitely make time to visit.
I'm about to embark on my final term of the course. This term will see me working on my final project, which will be exhibited at the Morley College Gallery from 7th July to the 14th July. There will be 16 of us exhibiting this year – considerably more than the previous year – so it's not clear yet how much space we'll each have available to us.
I'm terrified, of course. I'm afraid of not having anything ready in time, and I'm possibly more afraid of not having anything good ready in time. Sadly, my classmates are all very talented individuals, many of whom already have strong ideas about what they want to say and do in this show.
My final project will, I think, stem from my work on skeletons last term. The title I'm using for my current research is “inner workings exposed” and I'm focusing on the human body, particularly its moving parts. I do feel confident that whatever form my final work takes, it should invite interaction. Viewers should be able to touch it, and ideally they'll need to undo parts and open it out in order to see everything.
One of my classmates suggested I check out Brian Dettmer's artwork, specifically the piece “Gray's Anatomy”, when I brought these ideas up in a class discussion last term. After finding it out online I realised that it had actually been included in the Skin exhibition at the Wellcome Collection last year. Dettmer can talk about his work much better than I can, so here's a presentation he gave for Atlanta Pecha Kucha in 2009.
Brian Dettmer - Remixed Media from Alfredo Aponte on Vimeo.
I'm still puzzled about how he carves the books though. He says in the video that he seals the book and then carves into it without knowing what he'll find. Presumably he can't glue the pages together because then he wouldn't be able to remove individual layers, but how he seals the books isn't revealed. I'd be very interested to see him working on one of these so I can get my head around the process.
Entry: Free
The Approach is a tiny gallery about a 10 minute walk from Bethnal Green tube station. It's above a pub - The Approach Tavern - which you have to go through to get to the gallery. Curiously, the gallery's website doesn't mention this quite important fact at all, meaning you can spend several puzzled minutes walking up and down the street if you don't already know where it is.
And did a double-take, because I saw this in the real world last week. It was painted in Leake Street, although I think it's already been painted over.
It turns out that it's part of an advertising campaign to promote Simon Morden's Metrozone trilogy, the first instalment of which, Equations of Life, comes out this week in the UK. The three graffiti pieces are designed to reflect the (very cool) book covers.
I have slightly mixed feelings about this. I think the io9 commentator who wrote “When a company does it, it's called advertising. When anyone else does it, it's called vandalism.” expresses some of my ambivalence pretty well. On the one hand, it's a cool and original idea, but on the other hand, part of the reason I like grafitti is the fact that it's not trying to sell me something.
Of course, unlike most adverts, this has already disappeared beneath somebody else's artwork.
A plot summary-heavy review of Equations of Life can be found on io9 here.
