Ceramics at Somerset House

Until 30 September there's a selling exhibition of ceramics at Somerset House. Many of the names were new to me, and I foolishly didn't write them down. These big vessels are by Kaori Tatebayashi -These dotted forms by Andre Hess were also among my favourites -
Both are on the exhibitors list for Ceramic Art London 2010 at the Royal College of Art next February.

Surprise

The camera took this picture all by itself...

London Fashion Week

...is over, so now it's time for London Fashion Weekend. It's been fashion week in lots of other big cities, it seems - which collections are these ... must be the Spring collections ...This giveaway of lifesize cardboard cut-outs is happening outside Somerset House; installed in the courtyard there is a building where they are having catwalk shows etc. As I was going up the stairs into the main building, a model was coming down them -- my goodness, she was Very Tall!

Skyride

65,000 people got on their bikes in the traffic-free (and other!) streets of London on Sunday. This is the fifth such event around the UK this year. (We were on the bus when we noticed a steady stream of cyclists, including children - unusual....so, out came the camera.)

Core studies week 1

Critical studies, the morning part of the day, was about semiotics - signifiers and signified, that sort of thing. The exercise of drawing what "home" meant to us produced new signs in response to signifiers - It can be about the feelings of comfort and warmth that are triggered; about pets, family, meals; about a particular space or an individual experience (tea & biscuits); a cultural understanding (the "stereotypical" picture); or even a map ("this country is home to me").

Some important words are iconic (it looks like what it represents); indexical (bears a visual relationship to the thing it represents) and symbolic (the relationship has to be learnt). Also paradigm (a set of related signs) and syntagm (a message made up of chosen signs).

We looked closely at two artworks - Anselm Kiefer's Jericho, shown at the Royal Academy
and Bombers by Gilbert & George, which was in their show at the Tate
Out into the world at lunchtime, to see this bit of deconstruction at the end of the street -
Here's the bigger picture -
Coming across this little scenario (a syntagm?) immediately afterward made me suspect the art installers have been very busy along Southampton Row -
In the afternoon, a demonstration of getting a balance of colours -
and then we painted lots of squares made up of lots of squares - top row, balance; 2nd row, contrast (tone, temperature, hue, etc); 3rd row was supposed to be harmony but the 4th row is more harmonious, so I'm calling the 3rd row "discord" -
Not sure where that is going ... let's check the info sheet - "to introduce the concept of using colour constructively" is the rationale. The assessment criteria, which I must admit have slipped past unnoticed till now, include this:

To take into account and demonstrate the use of the following concepts:
-composition: positioning, arrangement, placement of coloured squares (horizontal/vertical/diagonal)
-proportion: the amount of a particular colour in relation to others (particularly important in the first exercise, Balance)
- movement and rhythm; see Mondrian
- pattern; see Bridget Riley

OK let's have a look at Mondrian -and Bridget Riley (from this interesting site) -Next week: contexts and modes of display in the morning, more colour in the afternoon.

Sculpture week 1

Off to the British Museum to start filling our sculpture sketchbooks. Here's an "imagined interior" - this used to be the gallery, downstairs, chok-a-blok with greek vases - my mother was so amazed to see this, when she visited. But that was 15 years ago, and I'm not sure if this gallery is still open to the public.Plenty to draw elsewhere - I liked the "imagined interiors" of these figurines from Athens, 450 BC -
I'm trying to work bigger and bolder - the figurines on the left are maybe 5cm high in reality -
And I'm intrigured by these Corinthian helmets, about 500 BC -
Back at City Lit, we were shown various carving tools for stone and wood, and how to sharpen chisels -Next week we'll be carving - here are our blocks of clay, drying out a bit, hopefully to the leathery stage -

Ceramica - galleries and Queen Vicky

This weekend marked the long-awaited opening of the new ceramics galleries at the V&A, with some fun events. I went along on Friday evening - and again on Sunday afternoon.

The galleries are on the 6th floor. Under the dome is an installation by Edmund de Waal.There's a light, bright look replacing the heavy, crowded vitrines -
The blue Egyptian sceptre is about 4000 years old, and the Japanese Jomon pot you can just about see in front of it is even older. (More about Jomon pottery later, perhaps - the British Museum currently has a display of dogu - Jomon figurines.)
At one side of one gallery, behind a glass partition, is the studio of the artist-in-residence, currently Stephen Dixon. There, you could help make a mosaic bust of Queen Victoria. I found my piece and waited my turn ... here she is "before" -
and "after" - spot the difference -
(Yes, it's the glint in her right eye.)

By Sunday afternoon there was hardly anywhere to put more pieces, and they had to be broken up ever smaller -

Ceramica - mug shots

The object of "The Collection", a project by Clare Twomey, was to fill the empty vitrines - which used to house the ceramics collection - with memories of cherished ceramic objects. You drew the object and wrote a bit about it, and it was put in the cases. On Friday evening they looked a bit empty -Mine is bottom left (needs more contrast...) - and here's Jane's favourite ceramic dog -
By Sunday afternoon the vitrines had filled up nicely -
and looked splendid amid the Raphael cartoons -
Tony added his dad's shaving mug -

Ceramica - other things

Apart from demos of basic pottery techniques, there were people in 18th century dress wandering around - "take a peek into the rituals of 18th-century high fashion" - including tea and chocolate drinking -On the way to see Barnaby Barford's film "Damaged Goods" we found this set-up for London Design Festival - love that floor!
In the courtyard, this sculpture is for the Design Festival too -
It looked magnificent at night -
One of the most fun things we did, both on Friday and again on Sunday, was to make stop-motion animation films -
They're very short, a bit amateur - and rushed - and the resources were a bit limited! - but they're on YouTube here (The Visit) and here (On the way to Market). Doing even a little "hands-on" certainly makes you appreciate the work of the professionals!

Produce and flowers in north London

The 60th annual CHADAHS show! All that's best from Hornsey allotments - can't show you everything, so here are some highlights.

Fruit --- class 62, Plums - one plate of 5, one variety; class 63, Any other fruit, eg apricots (4); boysenberries, bullaces, dewberries, tayberries, raspberries, loganberries (15-20); damsons (6); grapes (1 bunch); medlars (6); melons (1); quinces (6); peaches and nectariens (4); figs (3); nuts (15-20)and veg -- class 51, Any other vegetable (that'll be class 47 on the other side of the table - 3 leeks)
and flowers - class 25, A vase of dahlias in a floral arrangement - one or more varieties - any colour
Elsewhere, some almost unnatural cactuses -
and lavender bags, for Hallowe'en -

Medals of Dishonour exhibition

Medals are most often thought of as sports prizes, or ways to honour people - but they have a long history and other functions, as shown in this exhibition at the British Museum till 27 Sept.

The highlight is the medals of condemnation commissioned from 13 artists, and many can be seen in the "Object Highlights" on the exhibition's website.

We Know Who You Are, We Know What You Have Done by Cornelia Parker - the format of the medal implies that these two rascals are having a tete-at-tete to plan further nefarious deeds -
Yun-Fei Ji's Coalition of the Willing also uses the two-sided format to advantage -
The "artwork" for Grayson Perry's For Faith in Shopping is much larger than the finished size - the reduction process keeps the detail, and has been used since the 19th century -
Another type of artwork is the project proposal - this one by Mona Hatoum -

Felicity Powell's Hot Air started as a series of wax models, beautiful in themselves -

The choices for the medal have the ribbon wound between them (object 18 here)
Another way of working - carving into thick watercolour paper - this was used to cast the background of Ellen Gallagher's An Experiment of Unusual Opportunity (object 8 here). This infamous biomedical experiment consisted of withholding treatment for syphilis among black inmates at Tuskegee prison for 40 years, even though penicillin was available to treat the disease.
Langlands and Bell's Virtual World uses codes - abbreviations for airports, NGOs working in Afghanistan, and a mixture of state-sponsored and banned organisations on the colourful side, suggesting the violence that links them, and the internet domain codes of 60 countries on the other - showing that these organisations also operate in the virtual world.
Finally, a 1920 medal by Karl Goetz related to something I learned about via my son's studies in African history - the involvement of many thousands of African soldiers in World War I, fighting for France, their colonial overlord (and forgotten, unrecompensed by the French state, thereafter).

The caption says: "This German medal protests against the presence of black soldiers among the french troops stationed in the occupied areas of Germany's Rhineland after the First World War. Unfounded reports of sexual crimes are the basis of Goetz's attack agains what the artist calls The black shame'. On the other side of the medal (right) a black soldier is linked to France by the letters RF (for French Republic) on his helmet and the ironic use of the official French motto, 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity'. The caricatured features and exotic earring underline the medal's racist message."