we like this… scarborough rapper james koppert aka edger’s take on part of the ‘all the world’s a stage…’ speech in ‘as you like it’. from the theatre royal bath/the egg shakespeare unplugged festival: www.vimeo.com/864259

are preparing to cycle 1000 miles in 10 days between lands end & john o’groats for charity. and blog along the way. and one of them is ged from artworks who we’ve worked with almost right from the start of electric angel.

why do we suspect that each day’s blogging will take place from a standing position? good luck ged!

d-day is 21st may. you can follow the blog and sponsor them here.

graham rhodes, scarborough’s resident ghost pirate and playwright, asked if we’d post a link to the roofie foundation website. and we’re very happy to do so. graham started the foundation when during research into the subject of date rape he realised that he appeared to be the only person doing so. a telephone helpline for victims was the result and the roofie foundation was born. visit their website here.

wednesday is ‘get blogging’ at creative coast. 6pm at cielo’s on sandside. we’re giving away free blogs and the training to use them but you do need to pre-register - just email me. joining us will be laura and bryan from the wonderful north project. they’re travelling around the north of britain discovering inspiring people and places and appropriately, blogging their journey.

the last day of exhibition, good weather and a suggestion by friend and local glass artist rachel prompted us to make the journey to yorkshire scultpure park yesterday to see the andy goldsworthy. it was well worth the drive, albeit a rather noisy one due to a dodgy exhaust on the car.

although art galleries weren’t really part of my childhood, the sculpture park was a place we did visit as a family largely due the fact that it’s a pleasant place for a walk regardless of whether you’re a fan of large 20thC sculpture not. however, the most exciting work on display yesterday was indoors - four new temporary works by goldsworthy. the highlight for me was definitely ‘leaf stalk room’ - a screen/curtain constructed from horse chestnut leaf stems pinned together with thorns. it stretches the whole width of a large room and just defies gravity and belief that it actually ‘works’. i think rachel described it as ‘drawing in space’ - the leaf stalks look like ink marks just hanging in mid air. amazing. indoor photography was prohibited so no pics i’m afraid.

the other works - an upside-down-nest enclosure constructed from logs and branches, a room with the walls covered in gradually drying and cracking clay, a series of volcano-esque stone mounds with central holes and a huge pine cone shape of interlocking logs were also fascinating, partly because of goldsworthy’s aim to link the gallery with the environment outside environment but i also felt his work lost something from being inside.

an epiphany for me was seeing a goldsworthy exhibition [photos of work] at leeds art gallery when i was 16 - the first time i’d seen his work and the time in life when i discovered a sense of freedom and galleries all at once. i think what attracted me to his work was the fragility and temporary nature of it and the possibility/fantasy that you could stumble across one on a walk in the woods. although you were encouraged to touch the ‘pine cone’, the fragility of the other pieces meant a strictly ‘no touching’ policy and it felt a little like a false preservation. i wanted someone to open the side of the building and watch them gradually erode. that these pieces will be purposely dismantled and returned to nature seems to be hurrying along a more natural decay that is usually present in his work.

at the opposite end of the park, passing some new stone wall pieces along the way, exhibited works included painting made by trampling sheep, snow dripping through the carcass of a dead hare and the full width of building windows smeared with cow dung and a wavy line cleaned across the middle [pictured at top of this post from outside plus two young eager art enthusiasts, dylan and grace]. perhaps tempting ‘modern art is shit’ comparisons there was a sense of randomness and play with these pieces that contrasted with the obviously very carefully constructed works in the underground gallery. the cow dung piece was engaging and the blood and snow paintings rather beautiful.

beverley will host the pre-premiere of two surf films in a surfers against sewage fund raising event which i am really looking forward to. step into the realm by swansea based film-maker tim davies and nine hundred miles by local man-of-many-talents oli banks. you may have seen oli at various music events playing his beautiful acoustic folk alongside stand-up bass player tom watton but you may not have known that he is also an excellent film-maker and surfer, even winning a nationwide competition on www.surfcore.co.uk. this film is the culmination of 10 years work by oli who has been a regular feature at various breaks up and down the coast with his watercam, floating about in the lineup. to take a look at his competition winning film ‘my mate mark’ see www.virb.com/899prod. there will also be an official scarborough premiere which i will also be going to.

also check out the work of dseven who designed this poster on www.flickr.com/photos/dseven/

Often when i come into the office Adrian will have left a copy of the finished print of a recent job or a new book, so to walk in and see a t-shirt came as a surprise. A really good one!

After working on the poster’s and program for the Acoustic Gathering, Steve said he’d give us each a t-shirt, and here it is, beautifully modelled by a headless me. I must admit, t-shirts with large logo’s aren’t really my thing but I really like the subtlety of the metallic text with this one. And it fits good too! Getting this t-shirt was also a milestone for me as it’s the first design I’ve worked on that has been used on a t-shirt. Hopefully there’ll be more jobs that involve t-shirts because , as anyone who knows me can see regularly, all my favourite ones have holes in and are faded beyond recognition. Isn’t that always the way with your favourite clothes?

acoustic gathering II is this sunday in the wonderful peasholm park. the island’s faux japanese pagoda has recently been rebuilt and when steve at mojo’s music cafe (who’s the dude behind acoustic gathering) asked us to design the posters again he suggested using that as an image. a waterfall runs down in front of the pagoda so we placed the names of the artists as if tumbling down the rocks.

last years acoustic gathering was superb - a chilled family-friendly atmosphere, fantastic setting (the musicians perform from a floating ‘bandstand’ on the lake - that’s the white silhouette at the bottom of the poster) and great weather. so fingers crossed for sun this sunday. do yourself a favour - pack a picnic and end the summer in style.

full line-up here, more about peasholm park here.

heritage open days started yesterday, events happening all round the country - many are a rare chance to get a look inside buildings that usually don’t offer public access. events in scarborough include a tour of the futurist theatre - last chance to see…? find events near you at: www.heritageopendays.org

scarborough has played host to steam excursions for the last few years, beginning with the ‘flying scotsman’ in 2005, the ‘green arrow’ last year and this year a range of locos including an A4 pacific ‘union of south africa’. ok, so it may not be particularly cool to get excited about steam trains but c’mon - don’t you just find them irrepressibly romantic? not just that whole brief encounter thing, but the triumph of 20th century engineering, man and machine in harmony, the brute power, noise and smell, the luxury and whole hand-crafted feel of the carriages compared with today’s buses on rails.

and then there’s the speed battles indulged in by the big four train companies of the 1930s of which the A4 pacific is a result. the most famous A4 is the mallard (now housed in the national railway museum in york) which still holds the world record for the fastest steam train. it’s that big blue thing that looks nothing like a steam engine. the streamlined casing still appears, to my eyes at least, fantastically modern. perhaps because we supposedly now live in a postmodern culture where technology constantly breaks our expectations, the mallard will always look modern, it was one of the last points in our history where we thought we knew what the future looked like. it even sounds like the future.

we have these trains and their engineers - notably sir nigel gresley - to thank for the invention of the inter-city rail network as they slashed travel times up the east coast mainline. so please excuse my geekish enthusiasm and absence in the studio later this afternoon as i take my son to see the future steam out of scarborough station.

feeling geeky yourself? - more about the A4