electric angel /design for life

houdini operator

we were delighted to be invited to transform a junction box in leeds city centre as part of ‘junction’ – a project by situation leeds that had its official launch yesterday evening. there are 10 boxes that have been given a make-over by artists and designers between leeds railway station and the headrow along park row.

we like the mystery of junction boxes – stoic immobile structures that quietly keep our towns and cities running connecting phone lines and ensuring traffic lights work as they should. but we thought what might actually be going on inside there..?

our box was a collaboration with john wedgwood clarke. junction is run by leeds met university gallery and the culture company.

sea swim

i feel privileged to work on a lot of the jobs we do, but being able to play with beach huts down on the sea front is possibly the most fun.

this is the first stage of a typographic artwork as part of ‘sea swim’ – an imove project connecting sport and art in surprising ways. these beach chalets have been lent by scarborough borough council to the project as their HQ, not just for changing into wetsuits, but for writing poetry, creating art and in time, exhibiting the fruits of the project.

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as the project finds its rhythm more text will be added. these initial letters are created in chalkboard paint so look out for group swim times, nuggets of info and lines of poetry cropping up on them over the coming months (a visualisation of how the full artwork might look using temporary text from the original sea swim proposal is shown below). as the project is about creativity and documenting the act of swimming we have this idea that everything created or collected could be an artefact with it’s own number as part of an obsessive curating regime. and so we awarded the chalets the coveted no.2 slot (no.1 being the sea itself…)

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you can pop down the chalets and find out more about the project this saturday any time between 10-5 and you’re invited to join the group for a plunge at 10.30am and 3.30pm. no athletic endeavour needed – it’s all about the experience of being in the water. to find the chalets just wander past the spa at the south bay and look for the big letters… john wedgwood clarke will be running a free creative writing workshop from 10.30am-12.30pm as part of the open day. to book a place, email him at seaswim@btinternet.com – bring a photograph of you swimming as a child!

(oh, and by the way – i didn’t paint all that by myself, don and jason are the professional signwriters, they just let me lend a hand so long as i promised not to spoil their nice brushes. more hand-painted loveliness coming soon…)

there’s nothing to see here

at the launch of the francesca woodman exhibition at the weekend, visitors were invited to jot down their last text message and have a woodmanesque portrait taken which were exhibited as part of the exhibition (shown below). we designed a photobooth to act as the backdrop to the photos, the background image also being used for the exhibition panels.

james took the photos after we’d brainstormed where we might find a wall with peeling paint that echoed the room in which many of the francesca woodman photos were taken. the resulting photos are rather beautiful in a minimal kind of way and i figured deserving of a blog post all to themselves. so here it is.

desert island discs – james

unlike adrian, i don’t own physical copies of most of these songs, or a working tape recorder, so i’ve gone all modern and made a spotify playlist. mine are in a kind of peak and trough order, opening hardcore, a moments relaxation, then back rocking again and so on: desert island discs

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desert island discs – adrian

with radio 4 about to announce the entire nation’s desert island discs, and just because we love radio 4 at electric angel HQ, we thought we’d indulge ourselves.

the problem with the eight record limit is not really selecting the records, but on what criteria to make the selection. james and i have discussed this on more than one occasion when we really should have been doing some kerning (apologies to whoever’s poster wasn’t quite as typographically sensitive as it might have been that day).
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bow wow, love spot.

you’re sat in a cafe, waiting for a friend who has just texted to say they’ll be late. drink in front of you, you look around for a distraction. it’s then you notice on a neighbouring empty table what appears to be a photograph with a scrawled personal message. your curiosity gets the better of you and you casually reach over to grab it.

just as you suspected it’s a somewhat intimate photo – a young woman on all fours and the message ‘see you sunday, bow wow. love spot’. you turn it over for any clue as to who it’s from or who it was meant for…

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this guerilla approach to marketing a forthcoming exhibition of photographs by francesca woodman was developed in partnership with the future ferens – a group of young people whose aim is to encourage their peers to engage with exhibitions at the ferens gallery in hull. the photos being exhibited were all given by the 18 year old woodman to her boyfriend, several featuring hand-written messages and being exhibited as part of the national ‘artists rooms on tour’ from the tate.

the original context of the images and resonance with that particular age group led us to suggest that a standard leaflet approach and corporate gallery look wouldn’t attract the audience we wanted to nor would it really communicate the intimate nature of the experience of seeing these small photographs up close (the future ferens have constructed a room-within-a-room to exhibit them). however, because ‘artists rooms’ is a nation-wide project we had to build a case for disregarding the corporate style guidelines and taking a more unorthodox approach that would work with a guerilla distribution approach. we’re grateful to the tate and the estate of francesca woodman for listening to our reasoning and agreeing to our breaking of the rules.

if you’re in or near hull look out events connected with the exhibition including a photobooth popping up around town where you can have your own woodman inspired portrait taken. the exhibition launch is this saturday at 1pm.

end of the line

public art project on the old scarborough-whitby railway line (now part of the national cycle network).

this project has its own blog (www.railwayart.com) where you can follow the project from initial sketches to completion which is why i’ve been a bit tardy on blogging it here. but over a year after it was installed, and now with a bench in place and a bit more greenery, it’s shortly to have an official opening. it’s a collaboration with rachel welford, includes a poem commissioned from john wedgwood clarke and involved the whole electric angel team in its genesis, not least rebecca’s skills acquired in a former life producing architectural drawings.

being the largest scale project we’d undertaken at that point, it was something of a learning curve for us – something that matthew at SBC’s parks & gardens team took in his stride. matthew really bent over backwards (while we were bent over forwards hoiking paving slabs around) to make sure the project happened with our pushing-the-boundaries-of-the-original-brief design – the original commission for was an upright signpost but we thought that with clever use of cost-effective materials there was opportunity to do so much more. kudos also to andy sharpe and the rest of the friends of the old railway line who initiated the project and were supportive and enthusiastic about our approach.

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the design aims to be both practical waymarker, signpost (to peasholm park, glen and cemetery) and a creative response to the history and current life of the line. the typefaces are those originally used by the London North Eastern Railway who ran the line prior to nationalisation, the overall shape echoes a train wheel with distinctive counterbalance straddling the route of the line. the names of the villages between scarborough and whitby form the central strip with john’s poem running around the circular perimeter.

the poem was generated after speaking with users of the line, john stopping people randomly to generate source material. we had primed the process by stencilling dates and times onto the surface that was shortly to be dug up. this approach using the vernacular communication method (there was plenty of graffiti on/in the bridge) resulted in lots of young people coming to meet the poet and contribute their thoughts. the first line of the poem which has also been adopted as the name of the artwork, “everybody’s always somewhere” was a direct quote from one of the young people.

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we responded to the words of the poem for the typographic approach, talking john’s lines for a walk and seeing where the words naturally wanted to go and play. there are also some design features that started as purely practical solutions to potential problems such as ice build-up in the larger etched lettering – the pattern that fills these (made from letterforms) helps avoid that happening. all the paving slabs are made from recycled glass paving that we had made especially with a skimmed surface to allow the glass particles to show and glint in the light.