electric angel /design for life

the big draw

it’s all community engagement with us at the moment… we were invited to lead one of ‘the big draw‘ events at the rotunda museum and were quick off the mark to snap up ammonites as our theme for the day – who doesn’t enjoy drawing swirly shapes? we had great fun and loved the fabulous drawings of everyone who took part. if you couldn’t get down today there’s still opportunity to join in creating a large banner each day up to and including saturday.

limestone journeys – the artwork

here’s the limestone journeys artwork i blogged about last week on display for the ‘festival of the environment’ at creswell crags visitor centre in derbyshire. there were some great comments about the artwork, not least the postcards written in character as ice age cave dwellers.

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if you’d like to read about the different sections of the artwork and the activities that led to them being created you can download an info sheet here.

limestone journeys

we’ve been clocking up the miles just lately on public art projects. one of these has been with year 6 at whaley thorns primary school on the derbyshire-nottinghamshire border. it’s part of a project called limestone journeys and we’ve been commissioned by junction arts to work with the school to develop a map-artwork that explores the movement and lives of peoples in the area over 15,000 years.

we took the stance that the artwork would be created from that which the young people had discovered for themselves and to this end invited writer-director lizi patch to join me in the school to develop a way of working in which much of the artwork could be created ‘in character’. the final 5 metre long artwork will include postcards written by ice age people, lettering by roman empire migrants and photomontage created from the lives of their grandmas and granddads.

the above photos are (clockwise from top right): photographing a possible drinking place to make an ice age postcard; exploring a cave at creswell crags; hot-seating in character inspired by family heirlooms; a day in the life of an early homosapien.

the artwork will be exhibited next weekend at the festival of the environment at creswell crags visitor centre.

the slow design movement starts here

sometimes it isn’t going to get done next day, at-the-printers-by-lunchtime, just-use-helvetica-and-it-will-look-cool, get-it-out-the-door-and-send-the-invoice.

but it is going to contain a lot of love.

take a slice of scarborough

things may have seemed a little quiet lately from creative coast – the north yorks coast creatives network we help run, but actually we’ve been busy running two projects engaging with the local populace.

one is helping NYBEP with roll out of a primary school enterprise challenge, more of which later. but here’s the first fruits of our main project – ‘we love scarborough because…’ – in which small teams of creatives have been teamed with local residents to transform the windows of empty shops in the town.

here are the results of myself and writer lizi patch working with young people from schools based on the north yorkshire coast who are studying on the schools creative and media diploma.

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as the premises we were transforming were previously a cafe, we took conversations over drinks as a starting point blending in memories of growing up in the area and snippets of overhead conversations. lizi teased these out in a creative session that involved scratch-performance and the discipline of telling a story via text messaging.

we returned the following week with some initial design and illustration ideas based on this imagery into which the young people designed their text, concrete poetry style. what you see on these pics is largely their work, just typeset in a cohesive style.

if you’re in town, you can see the windows on northway, just past the stephen joseph theatre. thanks to all the talented young people (who are credited on the windows) and to course leader spencer williams for a very enjoyable and productive experience. also to colin ellis estate agents and GBR phoenix beard property services for their enthusiasm and permission for the project. 2 more shops to follow by other creatives…

sea swim

i feel privileged to work on a lot of the jobs we do, but being able to play with beach huts down on the sea front is possibly the most fun.

this is the first stage of a typographic artwork as part of ‘sea swim’ – an imove project connecting sport and art in surprising ways. these beach chalets have been lent by scarborough borough council to the project as their HQ, not just for changing into wetsuits, but for writing poetry, creating art and in time, exhibiting the fruits of the project.

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as the project finds its rhythm more text will be added. these initial letters are created in chalkboard paint so look out for group swim times, nuggets of info and lines of poetry cropping up on them over the coming months (a visualisation of how the full artwork might look using temporary text from the original sea swim proposal is shown below). as the project is about creativity and documenting the act of swimming we have this idea that everything created or collected could be an artefact with it’s own number as part of an obsessive curating regime. and so we awarded the chalets the coveted no.2 slot (no.1 being the sea itself…)

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you can pop down the chalets and find out more about the project this saturday any time between 10-5 and you’re invited to join the group for a plunge at 10.30am and 3.30pm. no athletic endeavour needed – it’s all about the experience of being in the water. to find the chalets just wander past the spa at the south bay and look for the big letters… john wedgwood clarke will be running a free creative writing workshop from 10.30am-12.30pm as part of the open day. to book a place, email him at seaswim@btinternet.com – bring a photograph of you swimming as a child!

(oh, and by the way – i didn’t paint all that by myself, don and jason are the professional signwriters, they just let me lend a hand so long as i promised not to spoil their nice brushes. more hand-painted loveliness coming soon…)

bow wow, love spot.

you’re sat in a cafe, waiting for a friend who has just texted to say they’ll be late. drink in front of you, you look around for a distraction. it’s then you notice on a neighbouring empty table what appears to be a photograph with a scrawled personal message. your curiosity gets the better of you and you casually reach over to grab it.

just as you suspected it’s a somewhat intimate photo – a young woman on all fours and the message ‘see you sunday, bow wow. love spot’. you turn it over for any clue as to who it’s from or who it was meant for…

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this guerilla approach to marketing a forthcoming exhibition of photographs by francesca woodman was developed in partnership with the future ferens – a group of young people whose aim is to encourage their peers to engage with exhibitions at the ferens gallery in hull. the photos being exhibited were all given by the 18 year old woodman to her boyfriend, several featuring hand-written messages and being exhibited as part of the national ‘artists rooms on tour’ from the tate.

the original context of the images and resonance with that particular age group led us to suggest that a standard leaflet approach and corporate gallery look wouldn’t attract the audience we wanted to nor would it really communicate the intimate nature of the experience of seeing these small photographs up close (the future ferens have constructed a room-within-a-room to exhibit them). however, because ‘artists rooms’ is a nation-wide project we had to build a case for disregarding the corporate style guidelines and taking a more unorthodox approach that would work with a guerilla distribution approach. we’re grateful to the tate and the estate of francesca woodman for listening to our reasoning and agreeing to our breaking of the rules.

if you’re in or near hull look out events connected with the exhibition including a photobooth popping up around town where you can have your own woodman inspired portrait taken. the exhibition launch is this saturday at 1pm.

end of the line

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.

process and performance: interactive theatre

this weekend found us out of our comfort zone and enjoying ourselves immensely working with students and staff at prior pursglove college, guisborough to deliver an interactive performance as part of their 450th celebrations.

the performance and preceding workshops were a creative partnerships project to develop an innovative approach to a public performance where the audience could play a role in shaping the action. our proposed idea (below) was the use of mobile phone technology whereby text messages could ‘activate’ the characters with audience members steering the eventual outcome depending on who they chose to activate and which tasks they selected.

with the students we looked at how we might bring to life historical characters from across 450 years of the college and engage their fellow students in the process. discussions around communication technology and protocol led to each student setting up a facebook profile for their chosen character, these were then used for interactions in character ultimately developing potential dramatic dialogues from these online conversations.

above: a timeline and initial character profiles exploring potential links between characters and social-historical events to weave into conversations.
below: queen elizabeth I on facebook

meanwhile having looked at examples of performance art and interaction – particularly fluxus and yoko ono, and some cross-referencing of classic pop videos that tell a historical story in the space of a few minutes, a performance was shaped bringing together facebook, text messaging and more traditional elements of street theatre. we invited darrell hooper who worked with us on the CHART Scarborough mobile phone treasure hunt to help develop the technology – the end result being android tablets as the audience interface and mobile phones for delivery to the performers. the audience are invited to click on a character’s image which then prompts that character to do one of a series of actions.

there’s a game element to this as some events have to happen in sequence to allow other actions to happen. for example, the prior who sought a royal charter for the establishment of a grammar school (later the college) can be instructed to converse with the pregnant wife of a schoolmaster from the WWII era, but she must have introduced herself to the audience via a diary entry first or his greeting will be refused. fun actions were also included such as being able to make prince george (on a visit to the school to plant a commemorative tree) sneeze repeatedly or have the C19th nurse hand out cough candy.

there are multiple unknowns with a project like this, not least the idiosyncrasies of mobile phone networks (almost every character was on a different network – initially by chance but then something we stuck with just in case one network’s coverage was interrupted) and the chance that the audience wouldn’t want to interact – we did consider a disclaimer assuring people that they wouldn’t be pulled into the performance… but the end result was glitch-free and the audience members responded with delight at being able to ‘control’ a character and fascination as to how it all worked.

a glimpse into the process

some photos explaining the production process resulting in the glass & mirror panels that rachel welford and i are producing for york NHS trust.

this is just one stage in the process – the first panel in the series has already been installed in one of the new lifts in york hospital hospital. for that first piece we sent artwork to a specialist glass company to carry out the manufacturing, but with the subsequent panels we felt we wanted more control over the process. hence a long day yesterday was spent at the sign-makers creating vinyl masks on two sheets of glass and two mirrors ready for sandblasting.

above: probably the most minimal photo we’ve posted on our blog. if you look closely you can see the design cut out of vinyl. the design uses photographs taken by rachel which together we adapted and added typography to.
below: ‘weeding’ the vinyl – peeling away sections which are not part of the design.

above: rachel weeding the top layer. each complete panel will be made from a sheet of glass with an etched and painted design layered onto a mirror also etched with a design to create a complex layered image.
below: applying the vinyl mask to the glass. the uncovered glass will be sandblasted, then the vinyl removed (another day of back-breaking work) leaving the leaf shapes and text clear.

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above: smoothing down the vinyl to ensure a sharp etched image.
below: front layer of the second panel. this is opportunity to view each as separate graphic designs – when complete the effect will be much more subtle and the dual layers will partially obscure some of the text. the intention is that the designs encourage multiple viewings by patients, visitors and staff of the hospital.