Tuesday 29 March 2011

Flickr


OH HAI!

Just got myself a flickr account, so you can see lodsa pictures of my work, also it taught me how to greet people in 'lol speak', so there you go.

Fantastic Fantastical Feast

This Saturday was the last of 10 ceramic workshops I have been assisting Alan Stott with at Camden Arts Center. We have been working with 7 children aged 8-11 making objects in clay for a 'Dream Feast' on Saturday, after a bit of last minute finishing and sticking bits together with this amazing epoxy resin that comes as a sausage of putty that you kneed together, we layed the results of all the hard work out; there was cakes, gingerbread houses, fish shaped jelly, candy canes, weird and wonderful cutlery, napkins, a sizable host of dinosaurs, monsters and cyber things (of course), candelabras, volcanoes and last but certainly not least heads of the guests at the feast; all made from clay.

It all looked fantastic but my favorite was Mikey's skull spoon with a flexible vertebrae handle "I don't think i'll make all 42 vertebrae!"

Pictures coming soon.

I'm running my own ceramics workshops in the Summer holidays, where the children will be creating artifacts form their own imagined civilisation so if you know any 5-11 year olds in the North London area please let them know!

Thursday 10 March 2011

Wooden Sardines and thumbprints

The Open West Exhibition and Community project:

My ceramic pieces in the exhibition and the new piece of furniture I adapted and clad in cardboard... why don't you remember how painful something is the first time round?

The postcard propped up at the back tells Gertrude Kiwi's story that inspired the pieces....

View of the exhibition with my cabinet in the back, the boat hanging from the ceiling was beautiful, I think it was made from gold-leafed cardboard. Alan Goulbourne's piece is in the foreground, the artist I assisted with the community project.


I spent the first half of last week in Cheltenham helping Alan Goulbourne with his half of a community project run by The Open West (the exhibition I was part of).

His piece for the project, based in the Hester's Way estate, is an 8ft spherical 'Bait Ball' made from pieces of 2x1 wood. A bait ball is a panic and defense mechanism adopted by sardines in the face of a predator and Alan's pieces referenced a community being squeezed yet coming together, as the area in which the project is based was due for much needed regeneration yet plans have been cancelled since Asda is moving in down the road.

I helped Alan by adding on the smaller 'sardines' to the piece and passing him drills and screws through a small gap as he climbed inside to attach the top of the sculpture.

My favorite part of this experience was heading over the road to the youth center and chatting to and involving the staff and young people there in the project. We collected over 1000 4x5cm thumb-printed squares as a side project which with their help we constructed into one large piece.