a year in the smoke... January 2011

Well it's been quite a year and as I look ahead to the next 12 months, it seems worth taking the time to look back and see what I've been up to.

January 2011 - snowed in – but not under…

BEH200

The snow finally abated enough to allow a flying visit to the Derix factory perched between woods and suburban houses on the outskirts of Wiesbaden in Germany to see the Bristol Eye Hospital glass panel samples. It was a chance to see the celebrated workshops where much of the most ambitious and vibrant stained glass of the past fifty years has been produced.

We had a long and robust conversation about whether it would be possible (or affordable) to achieve the finely detailed sandblast patterns while making sure that the prints would be bright and luminous. I had a very particular idea in mind that seemed to pose an almost insurmountable technical challenge - the UK producers had assured me that it could not be done.  But the team finally agreed that they would have a go- but I would need to completely rework the artwork files. Many many hours of clicking and dragging ensued.

I was invited to stay in the home of the Derix family next to the factory, while my host Andrea MacKay kindly took another visiting artist and I on a whirlwind tour of the cultural sights, sausage joints and stylish bars of this tidy town. For more information about Derix, see  http://www.derix.com/en/

The Admissions team at the Eye Hospital invited me to create a pair of panels for their newly-decorated office, with their patterns on the one hand, and a single pattern combining their team data on the other. The file was so huge that this poor machine had its sleep function turned off, spending over 15 hours crunching and whirring on the kitchen table several days running until I found the pattern that seemed right.

Individual and group patterns from the Admissions team project and, below, panel installed in the office. 

Music

I was excited to hear that my entry for the Jerwood Maker’s prize had been shortlisted - a very rudimentary video shot by a fellow student Mia Fernandez of me playing a series of glass horns, singing bowls and borosilicate flutes. Andrew Lamb, curator of the Bate Museum of Musical instruments in Oxford suggested that the work might find a temporary home in his grand wunderkammer once the current exhibition ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ was over and we agreed to talk more.

Clear horn and black horn 2011, blown by Louis Thompson. Rain stick detail, borosilicate and corn kernels, blown by Shelley James

The visit to Oxford was a chance to spend time at the Museum of the History of Science, to enjoy the treasures there and prompt an outing with Claude along the Thames to the National Maritime Museum past the site-specific sculptures to wonder about different ways to present information. 

Oxford Museum of the History of Science, National Maritime Museum and site-specific sculpture representing discovery of longitude and latitude, January 2011. 

RCA

This was crunch time for the PhD proposal – working with tutors Alison Britton and Martin Smith whether to decide whether to apply for an upgrade from MPhil to PhD and whether I might be able to secure AHRC funding. Studio practice focused on refining the techniques developed in the first three months of the academic year, working with Simon to encapsulate and register matrices of marks. 

I also found time to go home to the warmth of my Frome Fireside and kind friends and to meet my new goddaughter Pip!

she's back!

A couple of you kind bloggers have expressed an interest in reading these updates, so here goes...

Since I last wrote, there is substantially more daylight about and I have been having a wonderful time playing in the grit, drinking gallons of strong tea and failing to read Lacan and the Superstructuralists.

Which I will have to do in the next three weeks in time for my interim exam...

On the glass front, I have been playing with colour for the first time, experimenting with ways of getting basic transparent coloured images inside simple forms. As usual, have been trying things out in hot glass.

hot glass dish and block with coloured print inclusions

And seeing what happens in cast glass...

lost wax cast of fistwith copper oxide prints

Have also been continuing my experiments with the lamp in preparation for an upcoming exhibition at the Centre for Alternative Medicine in London next month, of which more in the next post...

lamp worked 'T cell'

The Bristol Eye Hospital has now confirmed the commission to create a piece of glass work with the staff to celebrate their 200th anniversary. Currently playing with ideas, sketches and budgets to present in the first week of May. It's my first proper 'public engagement' project and I'm trying to come over all cool and confident but I'm Very Scared.

Bristol Eye Hospital entrance

On the academic front, an abstract on my research has made it through the first round of selection for a conference on Innovation in Glass at the University of Wolverhampton in August - it's a very prestgious thing, but now I have to write another 10 pages of the stuff!

I also published an article on digital print in glass in Printmaking Today this month, will give a lecture at UWE as part of a seminar series on Art and Science next week and am in the process of setting up an art and science seminar in partnership with Imperial College for the end of the summer term.

The next big deadline here at the RCA is the Interim Exam on the 7th of May, at which I need to present work so far set against my original proposal and plans for the next stage, written up as a 3,000 word report, plus a chapter of the thesis - again, around 3,000 words or so.

Have also started playing the recorder again, having the first of what we hope to be regular duet evenings with a girlfriend in Islington last week. Not sure her neighbours are so keen...

Have also been to Paris, dancing and life drawing - great fun.


Not a lot of time for sitting around in my little garden in Frome - but planted loads of bulbs, scattered seeds liberally about and dug in a profusion of roots and shoots donated by a dear friend's father.

So we will see what has grown next time I make it back there!

out to grass

Spent the past week at a residential conference with phD students from ICL at a once-fine county seat lost in scruffy fields between Wokingham and Bracknell.

group photo at Eastman Park

Fifty fiercely bright, beautiful and supremely sheltered young scientists and two of us older and rather less-sheltered representatives from The Arts inched through a long sequence of personal development exercises, energetically facilitated by failed slightly older scientists with the help of a Learning Journal and lots of flip charts.  Mountains of fried food were scooped at speed from the all you can eat buffet, while competition for the last slice of chocolate brownie almost cracked the veneer of civility.  Lots of horsing about too - and the chance to meet some very talented and thoughtful people who I hope to see again. 

Back to London and looking forward to getting down to some work in the studio - as well as getting down to writing a 3,000 word essay due by the end of next week.  

More soon...

packed...

Busy and exciting times...

A long-held wish to be invited to lead an arts project for Bristol Eye Hospital seems as though it might just come true. 

For their 200th anniversary, the Hospital is refurbishing the building and have asked me to set up an installation of my work (with a real chance of them actually buying some!) and to lead a staff project to create a piece of new work to celebrate this milestone.  The proposals are in the process of review by various Boards and sponsorship being sought from companies, so nothing signed yet.  But it really does seem likely to happen...

A chance meeting with the head of the Medical School at Bristol University in December led to my writing a short piece on creativity for the students - and I have now been asked to make a video about my working practice for inclusion in the course materials and online.

Yesterday, I was invited to be part of the very prestigious ReCollect exhibition in May and some new and rather fragile work has just gone off to Singapore as part of a touring exhibition that seems set to globe trot for the next six months - let's hope it survives.  

And, in the meantime, have been ploughing on with the research for the RCA - a big tutorial on Thursday kept me burning midnight oil for most of the week.  Seems to have gone ok, but, although I am making piles of samples and learning a lot, it's not yet entirely clear where it's all headed. 3,000 words to write in the next two weeks and a formal presentation the week after - need to find out who on earth are Derrida and Deleuze.  Keeping me on my toes. 

hot glass test...

lamp work test

rhino test

Plus the Bristol house - still not sold, but apparently lots of interest.  A group of young men move in on the 12th to help  with the mortgage. Let's just hope they do the washing up from time to time and don't scare off any potential buyers. 

And Frome - a wonderful if currently rather cold and scruffy refuge. Getting through the logs at an alarming rate. Finally got a first coat of gloss on the windows last weekend and hope to get up a ladder again later today to get a second coat on - weather permitting... Hoping to get the broadband connected too so that I can skype and surf in my beautiful light and airy study. 

Frome...

Off to the Mall Galleries to collect work that was rejected for the Originals exhibition.  Feel disappointed but there is plenty to be getting on with...

back to school

It's hard to believe a whole month has passed since last writing this. 

A blur of biting cold, broken boilers, heavy boxes and bed with raging sore throat. 

Plus some magic moments - London Dungeons with the Desbons, roaring fires with friends in Frome, bombing downhill on a sledge with the Bartons and light airs on the Levels. 

Heartily glad to be back at college - and some exciting plans afoot - potential project with the Eye Hospital to create a display of recent work in the new building and to create a new piece with all the patients and staff to celebrate their bicentenary. Plus a chance to work with one of the nurses there to create a series of new artworks to help her to explain how the immune system works. 

And a film with Medical School at University of Bristol to consider how art and science can work together. 

Plus college stuff - getting to grips with lamp working, learning about the history of glass and my very first rapid prototyped model using the Rhino software all on my own!

Much to look forward to - and now back home to Frome to get some green air in my lungs. 

Time travel

What a trip since I last wrote this...

Having prepared the OIA conference, commissions and lecture so carefully, Claude Butler and I parted company rather unexpectedly on a steep and slippery slope, bruising brain, hips and pride and ruining my helmet.  What should have been my moment in the spotlight on a podium was spent having a torch shone into my eyes and ears by a very brisk nurse in the Bath hospital casualty ward.

Greatly restored by the calming and encouraging atmosphere of Perfect View by Monday I was on my way to Bristol ready to exchange contracts on St Andrew's Road and hoover the stairs for the last time.  But the buyer reduced his offer by £4,000 that day, effectively pulling out. It seems that he had been negotiating on two properties at once.  I will never know why but decided to go ahead with the move anyway. A pair of gentle giants steadily stacked their Luton so full that the mud flaps trailed along the ground as we wound across the Mendips.  All this piled into the cottage still rather full of Roy and his team fixing loft and replacing rotten windows

 

High Street...

Gathering another slew of boxes from Farnham was a chance to catch up with my sister Nikki and to make letters out of toast for my nieces' breakfasts before heading back to unpack. Frome at last has a cosy bedroom a working kitchen and rather draughty bathroom and most of the post seems to show up there finally.

But the rest is still in utter chaos as I wanted to get back to college, the important deadlines and exciting atmosphere - workshops with Bonnie Kemske on tactile sculptures, Peter Aldridge on Corning and the studio glass movement in America, Glenn Adamson on contemporary craft, Brigit Connolly on alternative approaches to writing.  

commission detail

Plus a commission for a gallery to be delivered this week, contributing to a new course at Bristol University introducing medical students to creative practice and setting up a new group to debate research culture in arts institutions across the UK and beyond. 

 

work in progress show

I have had another offer on the Bristol house, but it's clear that the Christmas break will delay everything by a couple of  months.  And then there will be an election with all the uncertainty that will bring. So I have been pursuing options of short term rentals for the house and garages - and a fire sale of the brick garage to tide me over.

desk in early morning sunshine

At least it's never dull! To bed...

Rolling stones...

How the time sails by, full of new places, people and ideas - but perhaps not quite enough sleep at present ... roll on Christmas!

A fellow student, Carmen, trying out a disabled buggy in Hyde Park

Last week, the Methods Lab hosted by the Helen Hamlyn Centre was a brilliant chance to work with other students and a 'creative partner' - a young man with MS - on an exercise to consider how to integrate the needs of different people in sustainable design. Not rocket science, but realised how much I miss working in a team.  Would like to find ways to do more of that soon. 

Degeneration 2, photographed by Dominic Tschudin

I also spent many hot hours trying to master the lampworking torch without anything to show for it at all, had an explosive but equally unproductive session in the hot shop with James (the one piece that made it into the Lear was cracked when it came out), a day with the RCA photographer Dominic Tschudin to get some better shots of my work, was filmed for the Work in Progress show and had a first stab at printing with finely-ground glass with the help of Steve Brown, who devised the process. 

 

printing with ground glass

I also organised a series of very constructive meetings as Student Rep trying to avert a minor revolution - it seems to have worked, for now at least.  We were even served coffee in the very plush Senior Common Room this afternoon!

students in the SCR

There were also trips to the Post Office with paperwork for the final stages of the house sale in Bristol, which seems to be going through...

And I was lucky enough to spend a memorable, windy 24 hours at the Herring Festival in Clovelly in Devon.  We camped in Avel Dro tucked deep into the harbour, sitting on the quayside drinking tea in our waterproofs for a couple of hours at dead of night wondering if the crashing waves of the rising tide would drag her across the stony beach.  The seas subsided so we put the tent back up and went back to sleep!

Avel Dro in Clovelly harbour

Two tutorials in the morning, then off to Bristol to begin to pack up the house and prepare the lecture for the Ophthalmic Imaging Association on Saturday. 

 Two men and a van will show up next Wednesday to take me, the washing machine and rather too many boxes of books, sketchbooks and tools (as well as the lavendar bushes and fig tree, gifts from Mum and Mim) over to Frome, where my new address will be 11 High Street. Frome BA11 1ER.

Will collect the last things from Farnham on Friday and be, at last, all together in one place in one piece again- well, sort of!