bob tuffin’s three acrobat sculptures which we’re currently exhibiting outside our studio/gallery have been joined by an interloper. hanging from the fourth arch of the spa footbridge, this chirpy fellow, apparently made from plastic milk containers appeared overnight. we rather like him.
we spent today working in the studio with pupils from scalby school as part of scarborough museums trust’s ‘RSVP’ day.
pupils from 4 local schools started the day at scarborough art gallery with a quick introduction to ‘bathers in sunlight’, a painting by zdzislaw ruszkowski. they then split into groups to work with a creative of their choice to produce work in response. rather than get bogged down with computers, we took a hands-on approach and created a design in our gallery windows hand-cut from vinyl. well done to john, adam, michael, nathan, james and luke who had no idea what they’d be doing until they arrived and took in their stride a breakneck journey from fine art via design processes to cutting and applying vinyl all within a tight timescale.
we’re hoping to be having a similarly enjoyable time working st. martin’s school pupils next week, responding to bob tuffin’s wire sculptures that we’re currently exhibiting in the trees outside our studio.
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
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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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.
i like pink. so i was delighted when creative north yorkshire asked us to work on their visual identity and to stick with the pink. these cards come in three colourways and are the first fruits of that work.
this acrobat and two of his chums, the creations of bob tuffin, are currently hanging in the trees outside our studio/gallery. they were installed for coastival and we hope to keep them up over spring and into summer if possible.
photograph by james.
‘winter waves’ is the current exhibition in our tiny gallery. it’s a collection of hand-made screen prints by custard4gravy aka andy mitchell. and they’re very modestly priced to make perfect christmas presents for the art lovers in your life.
do call in and have a look – they really are fabulous, or if you can’t make it down to us, visit www.electricangelgallery.co.uk where you see some more pics, read a bit more about andy and buy prints. there’s still time to get them posted to you for christmas. plus we have a few free ‘winter waves’ prints left in pink or blue (see below) – we’ll be glad to pop one in your order.
andy’s also been painting on our walls and installing some winter waves of his own which have transformed out tiny gallery space into a wonderfully stormy aviary.
some photos of the current exhibition in our tiny gallery.
gaby hanging the main piece of the show which is a 1m x 1m ceramic work. ‘resolutions’ is only up for a few more weeks so do call in for a look soon (we’re usually open 9.30-5.00 monday to friday. if you’d like to visit at another time just get in touch.)
invitation to the opening of ‘resolutions’ by gabrielle naptali which is showing in our tiny gallery until 24th november.
we liked the idea of posting a little piece of potential artwork out as part of the invitation and so these invites were handmade by gaby and ourselves – the card folds to seal in and protect the fragment although we did hear that one piece had escaped in transit. it is probably now crossing britain in the corner of post bag. the porcelain is layered black and white – the same material that the two main pieces in the exhibition are made from and their random broken shape (each is unique) reflects the element of chance that is part of gaby’s current work in ceramics.
electric angel design studio, scarborough, north yorks uk
incorporation no. OC336155 vat reg no. 927293892
'city of invention' - public artwork in derby
'echo funnel' - at enchanted parks 2011
'everybody's always somewhere' - public artwork
CHART Scarborough - cultural map, trails & more
adrianriley.com - he talks about interesting stuff
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