Silence here for a couple of weeks. A busy period of making for Kids.Modern and for Poundshop (opening tomorrow), a pop-up-experimental-shop curated by Household and Sara Melin. The shop space on Hoxton Street looks great, designed by architect Finn Williams and product designer Fredrik Paulsen. My contribution is an edition of 50 Hand Werk boxes, each containing a set of materials and forms, for abstract play.
Wood, plastic, ceramic, rubber, fabric. The components, mostly designed and cut to combine with counterparts sourced from school science lab suppliers for example, have a character that sits somewhere between board game bits, measurement tools, ambiguous accessories for clothing, for eating.
They sit and stack in a way which remembers systems seen for storing wooden flutes in the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, Scrabble letter lips, cutlery trays, test tube racks.
The sets each imply activity but there are no rules or guidelines supplied. Hand Werk is simply about sensibility brought about by mute play, by handling. No rules because the elements should be moved and moved again.
Boxed as seen here. The interior subdivisions point to an archival method. This process is as much for my own need for clarity and foothold in understanding form and intercompatible materials, to take then into a larger scale. The incremental marks help the pieces to speak to one another. The black marks are inlaid, beginning a technique I would like to take back into furniture as a way of taking the design off upholstery and onto the wooden framework.
A set of silkscreened and overlocked mats, each with a sequential route.
And sheets that sit inside the box lid, as a placeholder for instructions.
These snaps gives an idea of the edition, with variance across the box contents. They were taken after a 'nuit blanche' of Saturday into Sunday, to finish for delivery. Impossible without the gritty, skilled help of Hannah Whitfield, Penelope Klein, Sally (of course) and my (irreplaceable) Dad.
The last two Fridays have been spent in the company of Mavis, Ben, Shahina, Rhett and Teal Triggs, from LCC's MRes Information Environments. Fed by Chris Roberts' fantastic stories of the hazily defined site of St. Giles, London. WC2-ish.
Each of the four has conducted an idiosyncratic research of the site, with results characterful of their own interests. Reminds me of Umberto Eco's empirical reader. Stranger-than-fiction-facts and lateral formal connections between high and low design are colouring up this most in-between of spaces.
These assemblies are my weekend in the wake of this information. Residual memory of the group's motifs, sentences, associations made visible, in order to provoke more handwork this Friday, when we meet.
So, these two, for example refer to sleeping homeless in the aisles of St. Giles. Others are less literal. The materials are my fumbling in and around architectural models without ever having made one. Trying to find a vocabulary more unsentenceable than that. A system just to express the gut-head response one has to buildings and spaces and ideas of both.
The off-key orangegreenyellow refers to the new ubiquity of Renzo Piano's Central Saint Giles building, studied by Shahina in particular. Since discovered what we believed to be powder-coated steel offering the colour is in fact glazed ceramic cladding.
So she and we discussed the keying in of these colours to vernacular desktop publishing graphic signage, an accidental but quite lyrical association.
And in general the imprint of a chromatic signature building on its environment.
The project, beyond this and our time, moves to Second Life, in conjunction with another study by University of Texas, Austin.
So it's important for some make-sense-of-it-making to take place.
And to be inspired by serious study of frivolous, ephemeral architecture. This beautiful colour-connected imprint of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Browns' Learning from Las Vegas designed by John Morgan Studio (2007).
FYI, this is the 'Haiti' plate, as seen in a previous post, before inking. Documented at the nicer-as-a-plate-than-a-print moment.
And this is the neat little platten press used for plates of this size, which lives next to its larger siblings used for the 600 x 450 prints. All housed in Camberwell's peerless printmaking workshops.
First foray into design for knit; a little commission for Monica, aged 11. An open brief, as long as wayfarers were included! Sally knitted the design twice for both sides of what will be a bag. Shown here before assembly, after felting.
The knitting machine scans the design from an artwork, drawn with a chinagraph onto specific gridded waxy paper. We are sure knitting machines have evolved beyond this moment but this is what we use for now.
Here's the original drawing, using a grid re-drawn onscreen to match the scan paper. Really I've used this as a test-card, to get a feel for the colourways from the yarns and the onset forms once applied to the lo-res knit 'pixels'.
The forms were taken from an exercise I set a while ago, to explain basic image-type systems on a poster, using a modular grid roughly based on Wim Crouwel's classic for the Stedelijk.
So, I discussed reading...
...symmetry and asymmetry...
...hierarchies in form, colour and spatial arrangement...
...alignment of text and image components...
...and pictorial use of the grid.
The knit process is a warm foil for the simplestupid compositions, of which I have many. So will try more in a test card mode.
Just sent this, a small 105 x 150mm woodblock print, for To Haiti with Love. Not quite sure how it will work but the artworks donated will be available for hi-res download and also the original prints for auction in an event tba. Anyway, the idea here is very simple; a geo-typographical cross-section with the sense that Haiti is actively rebuilding itself.
A week of reflection and patchy wakeful nights. Looking at my students' work. Quite something to be in a room with the collective ability and intelligence of 55 people. Talking as we go, inevitably about 'the subject of illustration'. We are lucky to be custodians of so much talent, in what is perceived as a boom-time for the subject. We and they dream to an extent of what could be as well as being excited about what is. We have, for example, some amazing children's book illustrators. We also have, for example, some amazing makers and writers and performers. I don't want them to have to shut down their options completely to fit the market. Or to have to abscond to another industry. I like having people who want to create the best children's books alongside people who want to author and experiment with other platforms (often the same person has the potential for both). Actually I don' t think one is more experimental than the other. But it's nice when it co-exists. And is not polarised. These activities nourish each other.
I look at Forms of Inquiry and think that this kind of space or community needs to exist for Illustration too. Critical Illustration? 'Critical' always seems to imply, in this subject, a kind of process-paralysis. I think one can make and think. I look at Four Corners Books and see a thing in the world that has the most archetypal attributes; a story with pictures. But it is for grown-ups. It is designed holistically. The concept. The images make you work a bit. Something you accept when you go to a gallery. It suggests what could be.
Holly Wales came in this week and was so interesting in conversation. We discussed these and other bits and pieces but here is someone with a level head, one eye on the market and one eye on the horizon.
I'm also thinking about Piet Zwart's two-colour letterpressed experiments, as seen in the Tate; Edward Wright's Flaxman typeface; and making this postcard-sized plate to print for the 'To Haiti With Love' fundraiser. More soon.
So, here's The Shoe Stool finished before delivery to its new home. The previous post discusses the text's origin in The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard.
Sally translated the drawing wonderfully into stitch, with some extension to her technique. Through a first sighting on AAPC and a recommendation by Luke, I landed a copy of Elsie Svennas' A Handbook of Lettering for Stitchers (1966). These spreads indicate the food on offer; for this project, the trammed-thread filling stitch shown above was adapted for the leg tone.
Here's a detail. Our collaboration is working best when we think together about the physical equivalent to linework, acknowledging the behaviour of a needle through quite coarse linen-cotton texture and allowing for this to lead a little more.
Always a mesh of visual cues that sort of rhythmically feed the language. I'm looking a lot at the exchange between Susan Kare's original pixel-textures for MacPaint and Memphis' inventory of Po-Mo-pattern, as seen and discussed on Rob Giampietro's incredibly info-rich and inspiring Lined & Unlined.
Chipping too at a kind of needly eeriness, something that detained me greatly as a child, around a padded, skipping step of malign characters in fairy tales. This image (via) from Heinrich Hoffmann's Struwwelpeter (1845), holds it in the arch small foot and meaty calf. The non-perspective of the wall had its say too.
So somehow this part of the original drawing became a little obsession; and a leader for other forms to follow.
Robert Helpmann's cobbler in (the unmatched) Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburgers' The Red Shoes (1948) has always rattled around in a corner of one's picture-memory for similar reasons.
Just finishing a chair commission, with Sally embroidering my drawing and upholstering to a three-legged stool. A lovely brief, to source a low chair to sit upon when putting on and taking off shoes; to make a typographic drawing about this action and the sensation of entering and leaving behind the world outside one's door. The text is taken from Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space. The bungalow, with its very nice interior parquet, is the home-to-be for the stool. I wanted the asphalt-emergent leg to have an Alice/Struwwelpeter creepiness. Will post images of the finished chair in the next few days.
This week's yet-to-be-letterpressed open drawing poster, for a potentially wonderful performance drawing workshop led by Maryclare Foá. The venue, used each week for this season, has the trace of Michael Caine's hated schooldays, Buckminster Fuller lecturing on his Geodisic Domes and, she reveals, Tommy Cooper performing magic.
If you've never seen him, this is he. No idea if this ever translated as funny outside of the UK; mercifully he was better than Benny Hill. Now for the letterpress.
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