electric angel /design for life

your place or mine

‘your place or mine’ is currently showing at scarborough art gallery and offers perspectives of the town by two different generations of artists. as with the previous exhibition, lines of conflict, there wasn’t any artwork complete to use in promotional material so camera in hand we set out to capture some of scarborough’s typography to represent different areas and demographics of the town.

the inside of the leaflet features text from two of the artists involved in the exhibition. we also designed interpretation panels for the show which using some of the photographs as drop capitals.

go on – take a peek

for the current exhibition in our tiny gallery – tickle my fancy – we’ve covered the windows with felt, laser-cut with text and a lace pattern to announce the exhibition and provide peep-holes into the gallery. we’ve worked with artist jan bee brown aiming for a holistic approach to the window panels, publicity, interpretation and exhibition itself so they work as a whole.

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it’s been an experiment in terms of processes and materials, particularly in the size of text you can cut out of felt – too small or too large and it loses structural integrity – but we’re pretty pleased with the results. the gallery lights up at night inviting passers-by to ‘take a peek’ through the lace.

the top photo here is of the interpretation panel using red vinyl lettering on copper-hued mirror to compliment the bath that is part of the installation.

thanks to camira fabrics for the red felt, the cast iron bath company for the bath, and don french signs for the laser-cutting and interpretation panel idea and fabrication.
there are more photos of the exhibition over on the electric angel gallery website.

swirl n bubble banners

as part of coastival we were asked if we could devise a way of using banners to create a more intimate space within the spa grand hall for the craig charles funk n soul club. hung at head-height, this combination of printed designs with hand-made material banners projected with coastival-esque swirls and bubbles did the trick and prompted lots of complimentary comments. ’twas a fab night out too.

printed banners sponsored by blue raptor signs.

thanks to david ruston for the photos which he took whilst photographing the festival.

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.