electric angel /design for life

magic lantern pics

a few photos from the ‘peasholm magic lantern’ at coastival. poet kate evans’ idea was to combine haiku, music, photography and typography in a 20 minute projection in the faux-oriental pagoda on peasholm park island.

my contribution was typographic interpretations of kate’s haikus.

a last minute health and safety panic meant we were all called in to ensure people got safely on, and more crucially, off the island. cold work but it was great to hear feedback – the last people off the island on saturday commented on how they’d enjoyed the ‘eye poetry’. we had 200 people visit on the saturday and were having to turn them away at the end.

pics above: text arranged to look like swans/geese on the lake; haiku about fallen leaves; attempt to use letterforms to suggest goslings.

bon voyage james

tomorrow james embarks on a 6 month visit to thailand, so today rebecca and i wish him a safe journey on what, no doubt, will be an amazing experience. [do they surf in thailand?] we’re hoping he gets chance to blog and flickr while he’s away.

james will return [sounds like the end of bond film...] in summer.

open for business …and art

a freak blizzard brought scarborough to a halt for our gallery opening, but lots of friends still braved the snow to look at rachel’s work and glass or two of much-needed schnapps. we had a nice gentle stream of visitors on friday – the first day of coastival – as the snow rapidly vanished and rachel and i were interviewed on bbc radio york.

the exhibition runs to 15 may and is open whenever we’re in. do pop in if you’re passing.

rachel has created two glass & mirror window panels as part of her exhibition which are specific to the location. they’re based on the view from inside the gallery and reflections in the windows from outside and can be viewed from both inside and outside the gallery. our gallery overlooks scarborough’s south bay and spa footbridge and they’re the images you can see in the design.

also in the exhibition are two lightboxes and two wall pieces.

we wondered if this was the very definition of postmodernism – me taking a photograph of rachel taking a photograph of a piece of work made from photographs that rachel had taken including a reflection of rachel taking a photograph of the reflection.

sign

the electric angel gallery

there’s a little back story behind our new studio. when we decided that we would buy our own premises we had a wish list of ideal locations in scarborough. obviously some would never come on the market or be anywhere near our budget, but museum terrace was one of those places we said ‘if that ever comes up for sale…’. well it did, so we did.

another thing we said was that if we ended up with premises that had a public face that we’d love to run a little art gallery. well we did, and so we are. yes, it is possibly the smallest art gallery you’ve ever seen, but we’re going to enjoy exhibiting work by local creatives just because we like what they do.

we open to the public on friday as part of coastival – you can catch our first exhibiting artist – rachel welford – and myself on radio york friday morning talking about it along with other coastival peeps such as FEEDER.

shown here is the poster for rachel’s exhibition which doubles as the invite for the private view and to come have a peek at our new place. the invite slices off to form a more traditional poster.

the modular approach

quick post on a few more coastival designs. we consciously developed a modular approach to the poster and programme design so that we could create extra posters and banners from a collection of existing elements. this not only means it’s easier than designing from scratch each time, but also that the festival organisers know we can create new material for particular audiences quickly and cheaply whilst retaining a distinct house style for coastival. below are a full page magazine advert [first transpennine express explorer], roller banner stand, billboard banner and street banner all using this approach.

…it’s a coast thing on the road

photos of the first two uses of the brand on local business vehicles by bluebird vehicles and awj glass.