electric angel /design for life

landscape revisited

interpretation panels for the recent ‘landscape revisited’ exhibition in scarborough art gallery featuring photos by joe cornish and paintings by kane cunningham.

the text was pretty much a conversation between the two artists reflecting their working methods that created the body of work for the exhibition. we took a typographic approach that helped break up the large body of text and highlight some of the common themes.

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the ordnance survey style contours feature shutter speeds and paint reference numbers rather than topographic data and run across the artwork labels too. larger contours on the gallery walls helped tie the exhibition together and were created on the fly responding to the hanging with jan, the exhibition’s curator, who had the original idea to team joe and kane together.

an A-Z of hockney

a-z trail around east park in hull to accompany david hockney’s ‘bigger trees near warter’ currently showing at the ferens gallery. the trail takes you on a journey around the park with creative tasks all relating to the giant hockney painting and comes as part of the ‘hockney backpacks’ containing drawing materials and other good stuff that can be borrowed at the park – an idea conceived by curator lara goodband. there is also an additional mini-trail of banners on trees around the park.

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.

unwrapped

some images from the unwrapped exhibition and publicity. the flyers are printed using fluorescent blue – not as in-yer-face as lime green or yellow but still the brightest possible blue you can get. we’ve developed a range of colours designed to contrast with the heritage colour palette generally associated with municipal galleries – a continuation of the work that began with dayglo orange of ‘crazy, damn right i’m crazy‘.

the image used on the flyer is by Eduardo Paolozzi. his work and studio recreation at the dean gallery in edinburgh is must-see if you’re a fan of pop art or just interested in post-war art and sculpture in general.

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you can read more about the exhibition at the contemporary art society website. it is, of course, a great exhibition. go see.

fossil festival

the natural history museum have come to town for scarborough fossil festival which is taking place at venues across the town this weekend. the advance publicity is in the format of a leaflet folding out to form a poster with details of the events on the reverse.

posters and banners at venues promote the event across the town – they seem to be working if the people heading into the rotunda museum as i took this photo are anything to go by.

we have intervened

the intention of CHART Scarborough interventions was to both raise awareness of the project and to get some input from the wider community. this was done by two competitions: one prompted by signs placed on prominent buildings around the town [that's a window in the art gallery above and stephen joseph theatre below - we also did woodend creative workspace, customer 1st/town hall, renaissance office and the library] and via the local newspaper, the scarborough evening news, who ran a week-long competition and intend to print a version of the map in the newspaper when it’s complete.

we also stencilled messages in the town centre which we hope will prompt a few people to think about place in a new way – part of CHART Scarborough’s intention to encourage locals as well as visitors to navigate around the town to a different set of criteria. we’ve got some [albeit simple] philosophy on how a map can change perception of place and thus the person courtesy of walter benjamin, guy debord et al. we’ll treat you to that little nugget another day…

how did you get here?

chalk stencil in Scarborough town centre. more on the the CHART Scarborough interventions soon.

more names, more faces

photos of our two full walls for the ‘name to a face’ exhibition. the mood of two distinct areas of the exhibition was of piecing together information, notably about victorian society photographer sarony, and making sense of a vast archive of material from a scarborough family. visitors to the show were encouraged to add any further enlightenment to the material on display.

to echo that theme we developed a chequerboard approach to the interpretation panels that was both very cost-effective and allowed some freedom for extra works to be added. initial layout ideas for the two walls were produced in the studio and then we helped place and fix the panels in the gallery.

other interpretation panels for the exhibition match in style and all the prints have a textured laminate and are wrapped to give the effect of canvases to tie in with the paintings that formed the rest of the exhibition.

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below you can see one of sarah venus’s wonderful wall paintings in the background – we incorporated a corner frame design by sarah into the panels for a cohesive look.

making an entrance

occasionally we are approached to work on something that doesn’t exactly fit our business model of working with public sector clients and charities, but the subject matter of the job gets us so excited we have to say yes. when we were approached by local engineering firm unison to help them make their reception entrance a bit more dynamic for a series of visits from the USA, thoughts of cladding the walls in dual-layers of images and text flooded into our heads. they’d never go for that…would they?

well, yes, they would!

unison’s clients include huge names in world aviation and vehicle manufacture such as boeing and alexander dennis and they recently began running tours across the UK taking in their facilities at eastfield industrial estate, alexander dennis, GKN aerospace and the university of sheffield’s advanced manufacturing research centre. we first helped them create a brochure for these ‘tech tours’ and this formed the basis of the reception area designs. our suggestion was to use the large wall at the back of the area as a kind of introduction to the tour, showing the places visited. this would be in two layers, a bottom layer carrying on the smoke design from the brochure and a second perspex layer showing the current tour itinerary and clients.

the use of the perspex layer serves 2 purposes. it creates a separate focus from the purely aesthetic background images, allowing important information to be displayed, literally standing off. it also takes into account the possibility that the tours could change venues and therefore the perspex can be replaced or amended without adjustment to the rear panel. bay area sign and image solutions were helpful as usual in making the idea work.

the total effect of the reception area was added to with door signage and another board showing unison’s key client, which sits behind the reception desk, visible as soon as you enter. in the future we hope to be adding more signage to the factory, including a 5 metre long glass wall and banners throughout. it’s exciting to work on such large scale things with clients who don’t see anything as an impossibility and like to see nice, big design as much as we do!

some other nice, big design will be revealed soon when the railwayart project is put in place.

meet the locals

young people’s activity guide for the name to a face exhibition at scarborough art gallery.

an exhibition of portraits can seem dull to a young audience unless the stories behind the faces are drawn out. the exhibition already does this very well, but another layer needed to be added for a younger audience. perhaps the trickiest part of this was guiding them round an exhibition you haven’t yet seen yourself – it’s one thing to look at the works that will form it and the plan of what will go where, but until you’re in the space itself with art on the walls it’s hard to think of the best way of creating that guide. but that’s a luxury you don’t have. we threw around some initial ideas with the museum trust’s learning officer, ian, and then developed the full guide from there.

‘meet the locals’ is designed to be used by children who can read on their own or by younger kids with the help of an adult or older child and encourages them to explore the exhibition according to themes, and back again to see if some of the paintings stuck in their memory. it asks questions and encourages them to make creative responses by drawing, writing and moving around the gallery. it’s an activity sheet that can’t be done anywhere except in front of the painting and photographs.

but there is something to take home – the rear of the guide has instructions of how to turn the guide itself into a mask and a pin-hole camera. galleries and museums have always seemed to be about more than looking – they’re about inspiring people, so we love the idea of young people going home and trying to ‘capture’ a portrait of someone on their pinhole camera.