Applied Arts at the Royal College of Art SHOW ONE 2009

The Royal College of Art applied arts show is a bit of a hit and miss, with quite a number of unremarkable works based around a flaky concept striving to find a place in the uneasy world of design art. In this year's show, there were a couple of notable exceptions in which craft and ingenuity married well: Charlotte Sale's exquisite work in glass and Katharine Morling's charming ceramic pieces.

Charlotte Sale's glass work transported me to a precious underwater world, with beautiful and fragile creatures blown in transparent thin crystal growing out of deep turquoise, sapphire and dark amber vases. All her items were beautifully crafted and demonstrated an eye for colour and composition.




Charlotte Sale - Spritz (left) and vases (below)




Katharine Morling's work was altogether different. It consisted of a series of playful "sketches" in ceramics, from tools to seats and even life-sized tables. The idea is simple but nonetheless clever. Quick and charming sketches become lively three dimensional objects in matte white ceramic with a roughly painted black edge. Her work is not limited to this look, however, as a visit to her website proves: there you will find fantastical works that mix exotic-looking fruits, vegetables and palm trees planted on upside down cups, cushions and Grecian columns. Incidentally, I happened to come across her earlier works whilst on a winter holiday in Penzance in 2007 The world is a small place.

Katherine Morling's Sketch of My Tools

Other remarkable works included Penelope Batley's lamps in the shape of blown-up earrings and Tine De Ruysser's textiles (which will be reviewed on a separate post).

As every year, I left the show with the feeling that many of the artists have yet to mature and evolve, the RCA just being one big stretch of a very long way still ahead of them.



Further information
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Charlote Sale's website
Charlote Sale at the RCA
Katharine Morling's website
Katharine Morling at the RCA
Penelope Batley's website
Tine de Ruysser's website

Artist: Nick Mobbs

When visiting this summer's RCA ONE show, I remember vividly walking past Nick Mobbs pictures and thinking them silly and non-nonsensical. Something drew me back to them, however, and the more I looked at them, the more bizarre and unsettling they seemed, whilst at the same time becoming strangely familiar. The title of the work is Dens and Lairs and it evokes both child-play and fear. In the leaflet that I picked up, the artist tells how "a structure made from cushions and blankets might protect us from fears that the brick walls and locked doors of the house cannot keep at bay". He also explains how these dens "harbour the imagined horrors from which we sought to hide", thus becoming lairs.

It's a very clever concept that finds suitable visual expression in the pictures shown here:

Nick Mobbs
Green Sofa Bed, 2009, screenprint, 99 x 132 cm

Nick Mobbs
Tower 2, 2008, lithograph, 65 x 45 cm

I also happened to come across another one of his pieces at the Royal Academy of Art Summer Show 2009. You can see it here.

Further Information
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Nick Mobbs - Artist's Website
RCA feature on the artist

Francis Alÿs - Fabiola at the National Portrait Gallery

Collection seems to be a current theme in contemporary art. Objects in cabinets and vitrines or dumped on the floor of an exhibition space could be considered examples of such a trend: Mark Dion's Tate Thames Dig, Joseph Beuys vitrines and Richard Long's Heaven and Earth at tate Britain. It is also a trend that I find extremely unnerving as it rarely achieves a meaningful or substantial effect.

With a very different and unique collection-themed piece, Francis Alÿs manages to successfully infuse a sense of awe in the viewer of his Fabiola piece, an agglomeration of portraits of a Christian saint known as Fabiola, all of which seem to be derived from a now lost nineteen century painting. The portraits were gathered over a period of fifteen years by the artist, who bought them in flea markets and antique shops all over the world.

When one walks into the exhibition space, an uneasiness creeps up: a feeling of impossible similarity, of reproduction, of cloning... one feels trapped in a room of deep turquoise walls with copy upon copy of the same portrait. On closer examination however, one can see the differences in the portraits as well as notice the wealth of skill sets on display.

Visit the National Portrait Gallery for this piece if you can as I am sure it will leave a durable impression on you.

Further info
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Fabiola at the National Portrait Gallery
Until 20 September 2009

National Portrait Gallery
St Martin's Place, London, WC2H 0HE
Open Daily 10am-6pm
Open until 9pm Thursday and Friday

Satellites - Jonas Bendiksen

Last chance to see this wonderful exhibition at Ealing's PM Gallery & House in Walpole Park. This collection of pictures, under the umbrella name of Satellites, is a moving, awe-inspiring, bleak and at times brutal depiction of live in former soviet republics. They are the result of seven years work by the photographer, who was denied a visa to Russia; he thus embarked on a photographic journey on the outskirts of the the country which resulted in the collection exhibited in Ealing and a book with the name Satellites, published by Aperture.

When I did some research on the photographer, I found that some of the pictures looked familiar, specially those commissioned by National Geographic (see link below).



Copyright: Magnum Photos

Further info
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Satellites
Jonas Bendiksen
PM Gallery & House
Walpole Park, Mattock Lane, Ealing, W5 5EQ
Until Sunday 9 August 2009
Friday & Sunday 1pm-5pm
Saturday 11am-5pm

Exhibiton
Photographer's Website
National Geograhic Portfolio

A World Without Bees

Following the current craze for bees in London with the Royal Lancaster Hotel and soon Fortnum and Mason keeping bees in their rooftop and serving and selling honey, I thought I would top up my incipient knowledge of honeybees with a bit of extra information on their dwindling numbers by reading A World Without Bees by keen amateur beekeepers Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum.

Published by Guardianbooks, A World Without Bees grabs your attention on the first chapter but after just a few pages the book becomes a long list of facts and stats, going on and on endlessly paragraph after paragraph. It also became repetitive, as some of the facts exposed on previous chapters were recapitulated in consequent ones. It did feel like one of those TV programs which tediously gloss over the basic story after each ad break. The book covers mainly the situation in the States and not so much in Britain or Europe, which was a bit disappointing. I was hoping to find myself in an imaginary world without bees, hoping the book would sting my imagination but it failed to do so.

The only passage remotely interesting was when pear pollination in Sichuan, China, was described. As pesticide abuse killed the entire bee population, pollination has to be done by hand, a process which is costly and time-consuming. The process is described by Simon Eade on his blog:

"By the end of the 1980’s bees were effectively wiped out from this area forcing local farmers to scrub pollen from the pear trees, dry it, and then carefully dust it onto each pear blossom by hand. This incredibly slow, and laborious task is still carried out each spring with thousands of rural residents taking to the trees clutching makeshift step-ladders and feather dusters."

The theme of honeybee extinction is extremely interesting and of immediate relevance, since some 15 to 30 percent of the food we humans eat directly or indirectly depend on the pollination of bees. However, the poor editing of the Guardian newspapers seems to have extended to the pages of this book, making it a bore. Shame.

I did however get a cue to read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, which I hope will enthrall me more.

Further info

A World Without Bees on amazon.co.uk
Edible crop pollination and the decline of bees
In a nutshell - Article on the National Geographic website

Moon

Not wanting to spoil the fun for you in case you decide to go and watch this film, I will be brief: Moon is a gripping and thoughtful tale of life on the Moon. It is stylish, well-paced and the acting is good. I haven't seen such a good sci-fi film since 2001: A Space Odyssey. Although the films may be comparable in some aspects, specially with a wink to Kubrik's piece embodied in on-board computer GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey), this is an altogether different tale.

In regards to costume design and depictions of the future, it is worth noting the 70s style of clothes and set. Whereas this is charming, unfussy and certainly appeals to a generation that grew up with such an image of what the future might be like in space, it brought me to think that the visionary design era of the cold war is long gone. Au revoir Paco Rabanne and Pierre Cardin! Leaving Hussein Chalayan aside, designers don't imagine the future anymore, they look back instead, their visions owing everything to those that did dream and imagine the future. This somehow post-modern attitude of retro-love finds also expression in other areas of design.

PS: Following this post I will be writing to Cosmo Landerman, who kindly unlocked the key parts in the plot to the readers of the Sunday Times. I am glad that I, at least, had already seen the film. You can read his spoiler review here, but please don't click if you intend to watch the film.

Further Information
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Moon on Rotten Tomatoes
Interview with the director on Time Out