electric angel /design for life

york press business awards

we’re delighted to have been selected as finalists in the york press business awards 2010 in the ‘best employer and education link’ category.

the other two finalists are harrogate & district nhs foundation trust and firmenich uk ltd of thirsk. we’re in fairly hefty company alongside a business with 53 employees and an organisation with 2300, but if nothing else i hope our nomination shows that small businesses can engage with education too and that it’s essential for the creative industries (where just about everyone is a small business) that they do.

you can read the york press article on us here. the award ceremony when the winner will be announced is on november 18th at york racecourse.

tiny poetry

what’s the point of having space if you’re not going to use it? ok, so we only have a tiny little space but let’s use it anyway. so as seen as our current exhibition is all on the walls (literally – see here) we thought it would be fun to use the gallery floorspace for some poetry gigs while it was on. there’s the loose theme of the sea/surf/coast to tie in with the exhibition, but we’ve told the poets ‘do what you want’ and we can’t wait to hear what they do.

for full details download a flyer here.

chart scarborough launch

some photos from last night’s launch event.

it began with a visit from william smith and other notables from scarborough’s cultural heritage…

…and finished with a brilliant performance by scarborough hip-hip school.

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visuals were largely the work of our placement student, emma, created from the map artwork. we used 4 projectors to create a wall of constantly changing images.

an invitation to wander

our big project of the last six months has been CHART Scarborough – an initiative to encourage residents and visitors to the town to explore the locale in a more inquisitive culturally aware way.

stage 1 is a printed map based around cognitive mapping theory – in short, a map that’s designed to work in harmony with your brain, not demand that you learn map-reading skills. this is launched, along with an off-shoot postcards project and a series of downloadable trails next wednesday. it’ll be interesting to see how it’s received as the project has evolved a long way since the original idea of ‘an arts trail’. we’ve done a fair bit of reading and research on this project including a number of workshops and consultations. you can follow the history on the CHART Scarborough blog: www.chartscarborough.com

this is the invitation to the launch which includes a section of the map and encourages the invitee to follow a trail that spells out C H A R T en route to the venue.
(CHART stands for Culture, Heritage and ART, by the way).

back to bradford

i’ll be back in bradford this evening with andrew clay of woodend, at bmedia‘s third thursday event. it’s a bit of prodigal son moment for us both having grown up in the area and now returning to tell heady tales of the high life in north yorkshire, or more accurately of the creative sector on the coast and scarborough’s national and european enterprise award wins (andrew and i both presented to the judges). i’ll be wearing my creative coast cap and we hope that this event, a reciprocal visit after steve ding visited us from bmedia before christmas, might enable us to build some strong links between creatives on the coast and in west yorkshire.

mentioning bradford also gives me opportunity to post a pic of a community artwork project electric angel did several years back now – we recently obtained some better quality photos of the resulting metal gates in the east bowling community in bradford but hadn’t had chance to show them.

schools creative & media diploma

last night was the first public exhibition of work by the students on the schools creative and media higher diploma in the north yorks coast area and mighty impressive it was too. we’ve been in touch with the diploma since a creative coast event in 2008 which introduced the idea to the local creative sector. i’ve since been invited to be an ‘business champion’ which involves offering a working world perspective to the diploma and helping connect local creatives with the course so students meet practitioners and get a glimpse of what a career in the creative industries might be like. rachel and i spent an hour with them at the start of the year showing them our work on the railway art project.

the diploma was described in a nutshell on the exhibition guide as…

“…designed to teach young people how to work creatively; they work in groups and alone on a series of activities that will give them a good overview of the different things you can do in the creative industries. the diploma is not one subject; the students combine work in six of the following disciplines across the two years: photography, interactive media, film, television, music, drama, graphic design, 2D art, 2D art, animation, creative writing, radio and audio…”

i wish we’d had this opportunity when i was at school. last nights work was response to a brief to record the ‘distinctive atmosphere of scarborough sea front’. these students are year 10 (14-15 year olds) and the quality of work was excellent. here are some that particularly caught my eye.

the image at the top is of megan jepson’s ‘scarborough/castle’ in which photos of the seafront are pasted on a foamboard model of scarborough castle. megan did a work work placement with us a few weeks ago so we had an idea of what her piece would be although i’m told the final construction happened rather close to the exhibition opening – we’ve all been there. it really exceeded my expectations – the scale (which doesn’t really come across on my photo) and use of colour were spot on.

the use of text in this oil painting by shannon barker reminded me of ‘we two boys together clinging’ by david hockney. creatively integrating text with drawings and paintings was a theme in several pieces.

and i was really taken with scott asquith’s ‘rolling’ in which a ball rolled and bounced the length of the sea front. it was inventive, nicely edited and great fun. a brilliant piece of work.

it’s a little unfair to single just a few out as all the students deserve to be proud of their work. congratulations too to spencer, their tutor. the only blight of the evening was that we didn’t get a better turn-out from local creatives who had been invited to come take a look and offer support to the coast’s next generation of creatives. obviously i’ve got my work cut out in this role.

what is a creative?

synchronicity – you gotta love it. whilst on a short break in liverpool this last week rebecca and i visited the tate to see the seagram murals but also took a look at this is sculpture as seen it was on having no idea what would be exhibited.

you never leave work behind, even on holiday and i’ve had wayne hemmingway‘s philosophy on designers being thinkers, not just do-ers in my head since he spoke at the opening of woodend. i imagine it’s his off-the-shelf speech but it struck a chord because electric angel is becoming more multidisciplinary with each passing year and a tightly defined perception of what a designer does or what medium he/she works in is increasingly irrelevant. you’re known by what you do, not by how you describe yourself. if you can think creatively about a problem, it doesn’t really matter if the end result is to be drawn, printed or built – you can learn a new practical skill or even better, utilise another’s expertise to help realise an idea, but the ability to design is nurtured over time and through experience.

wayne had curated one of the rooms in the sculpture exhibition (hence the synchronicity), complete with disco-funk soundtrack and colour-changing dance floor. has anyone told him he’s a designer and should stick to boots? not for years. he’d done a good job at the tate and brought his trademark man-of-the-people approach to the sometimes stuffy and clichéd world of art galleries.

so wayne’s philosophy was in my head as i wandered round and had a quick boogie, not least as i knew i’d be returning to a studio where the job list includes designing maps, concrete paving and school uniforms.

and posters and leaflets of course.

[image: sketches for possible uniform styles at graham & raincliffe schools]

updates-a-go-go

yep, it’s update night at the first creative coast of 2010 with news and opportunities from the north yorkshire creative network and on local projects. essential if you want to know what’s going on and how you might get developed or commissioned (courtesy of a new scheme offered by the north yorks network). rick of chrysalis arts and wendy of create will be spilling the beans. it’ll be nice to be back at the merchant too. 5.30pm. link to creative coast facebook group.

digital scarborough 2010

cc returns

we needed to quickly knock up some flyers for creative coast which kicks off again next week after a bit of a break and couldn’t resist this pun.

ironically all the effort into enterprising britain [2009 brochure here featuring scarborough] combined with a very busy 6 months for us and create meant that some of the things that won us the award have slipped – hence the almost absence of creative coast this year. but despite being quiet we have been busy behind the scenes making links and securing a little funding that will enable us to hook up with networks across yorkshire, sharing good practice and looking for opportunities.

the first of these is an evening with steve ding of bmedi@ in november, we’ll be sending a posse over to bradford in 2010 and hopefully get some kind of networking event sorted too. we have hook-ups with creative, IT & digital york for 2010 in the planning stages as well as having our sights on leeds and hull too. looks busy – we’re definitely spurred on by the two enterprise awards and looking forward to sharing our story. our ‘roadshow’ approach is also something of a pilot scheme that might be rolled out to other sectors with creative coast training organisations and businesses in scarborough how to get out there and share their story.

we’re also continuing what we hope are useful training/taster events, the first being ‘twitter night’ next thursday plus we’ll be bringing the creative sector on board with the CHART Scarborough project via a fun mobile phone treasure hunt in the dark. if you haven’t got hold of a flyer you can click on the second image above to view it large enough to read the text. looking forward to seeing folks on thursday.