Prepare Day New Designers

Went with J (and A&E) to Business Design Centre for the Prepare Day for New Designers 2010. I'm not going to be there this year, but am being assessed on Professional Practice so thought it better timing to attend now. Many speedy, detailed talks on a huge range of subjects.

• Stand presentation - Louise Pacifico ND Sales Manager
• Registration - Phil Vann from Interchange Communications
• How to get the best out of your participation in ND -  Ray Marrs from Bucks New University. (Favourite tip..do not be scary or weird.) His PowerPoint is on YouTube, in two parts. These links should work...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqmKoMjObWg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4UMSvEd5Kg&feature=related

• What is a judge looking for? - Janine Burrows from tigerprint
• Copyright -  Alex Papakyriacou from Briffa
• Costing and pricing work - Isobel Dennis ND Event Director
• What the press are looking for/ stand presentation - Karoline Newan from Articulate Communication PR Agency

Graduates get to share this space...

next door to what will be the press office ....

The display boards are wooden and sturdy, with lights (to be ordered) and plug point. Very difficult to photograph yet hundreds of people did. Here's mine...

This is the view looking over the balcony. Think it will be blocked off by all the display stands...

This one wants to be upside down and I can't work out why. Attached three times and this is just the way it wants to be. Stand on your head...

Gallery Brum

Mum sent this. I gave her the drypoint etching print for last year, as a welcome change from pottery. That's my vase too, from evening class. Very heavy. Could do some real damage. But not to mum's furniture because she puts protective cork patches on the bottom of my work. To protect the wood, not the pots. Mum and M have treated me to a dremel now, so no need for cork bottoms anymore.

  

Print from end of year show last year. Tutor said they were rather peculiar. Got a good mark for my lino printing!

Moon Jar

This small exhibition at the British Museum in 2007 was when I first get excited about the Moon Jar. Moon Jars were made in Korea from the mid 17th to mid 18th century. They were large, white, porcelain storage jars. There are only twenty Moon Jars left in the world. They were thrown in two sections and then joined in the centre. This often left interesting marks around the tummy, and many did not survive the kiln firing. The slumping and warping were regarded as nature taking its course - serendipity.

The exhibition showed great numbers of modern Moon Jars being created, and then lots being destroyed after they had collapsed.

Photographer Koo Bohnchang was inspired by these photographs of Lucie Rie by Lord Snowden with her Moon Jar.

 

This Moon Jar is the one now owned by The British Museum. From their website...

" The jar also testifies to the admiration of two of the greatest twentieth-century British potters for Korean wares. It was bought in an antique shop in Seoul by Bernard Leach (1887-1979) in 1935, on one of his visits from Japan. He gave it to Lucie Rie (1902-95), who on her death bequeathed it to Janet Leach. The British Museum acquired it from her estate in 1999. They also acquired a letter from Bernard Leach to Rie, in which he asks her to collect the jar from a friend's house and look after it during the Second World War (1939-45). In the event, when Leach saw the jar in Rie's studio, he decided that it should remain there. A portrait by Lord Snowdon shows Rie, dressed all in white herself, seated beside the pot.”

 He decided to find and photograph the world's remaining Moon Jars, culminating in a photography exhibition and book. I missed the book at the British Museum but managed to get a copy by emailing Koo Bohnchang. Love it.

  

 

See my last blog post about Adam Buick, a Welsh ceramicist who makes modern Moon Jars.

Adam Buick

 This BEAUTIFUL moon jar is by Adam Buick. http://www.adambuick.com/ Saw his work first in Denbigh a few years ago, just after I saw the Korean Moon Jar exhibition at the British Museum. Adam Buick makes the same form over and over again, sourcing his local area for ingredients for the clay body and for glazes. Each Moon Jar is completely different.

He makes miniature Moon Jars too....

I love these. I have three, one from Clay Art Wales Denbigh, one from Art in Clay Hatfield and one from The International Ceramics Festival in Aberystwyth. That's a nice odd number. If I had one more that would look funny. I couldn't have four. I could live with five though. Or seven...

Jug of the Month - April

I collect jugs, and try to keep my collecting to jugs only. I have been known to take a wrong turn and buy a side plate or a bowl instead, but mainly I manage to keep to a jug.

I’ve decided to start a new special blog feature called Jug of the Month. (In my head that has a theme tune…something a bit Emmerdale Farm ish.)

Toyed with the idea of Jug of the Week, as I’ve got enough jugs to sustain this for nearly a year, but I worried that would be inadvertently encouraging myself and giving myself the authority to buy many many jugs. What if I ran out of jugs? What would happen to my Jug of the Week feature? Better buy some more jugs. That sort of thing. Jug habit justified by blogging habit.

Jug of the Fortnight just doesn’t have a ring to it…so Jug of the Month it is.

So here is my first Jug of the Month…

A big beautiful blue Portmeirion Totem jug, an Easter £5 bargainous gift from the Giant Flea Market at Shepton Mallet on Easter Sunday. Went with my neighbour P.

Texted J at work to brighten her working day with news of my new jug, and she happened to be on a break reading Homes and Antiques magazine, and there was my jug...

I'm just so in tune with the market. Just can't help it. Nothing to do with it being the 50th anniversary of Portmeirion this year. They've relaunched some of the original designs that 'revolutionised the casual dining market in the 1960s and 1970s.'

 

 

If we'd owned any Portmeirion when I was a child it would have had to have been this colour, as I was raised in a world of brown and orange.

Trace

J and I were reminded of an installation we saw last time we were at the Pitt Rivers. It was called Trace, and was a response to the museum's process of cataloguing all of their items. I've got some very bad photos of it, but lost all my notes (stolen along with rest of handbag contents from boot of car while I was walking on Crosby beach photographing Anthony Gormley's Another Place). I took loads of notes!

This photo is from the prm website...

The rest are mine. Oh dear...

Les Biggs watched what went on behind the scenes at the museum, and thought about the secondary, unseen collection. He responded to the meticulously written, typed and filed index cards, with drawings and photographs attached. There were 105 porcelain boxes; 96 sealed and displayed in a cabinet and 9 in other cases in the gallery with lids open and contents on view. I loved the language of classification he explored. Linnaen. Trace. Artefact. There were also lots of quotes. Here are some I've gleaned from peering really closely at my bad photos...

Anything becomes fantastical if you stare at it long enough. Gustave Flaubert.

Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars. Walter Benjamin.

Life doesn’t last. Art doesn’t last – it doesn’t matter. Eva Hesse.

The serial artist does not attempt to produce a beautiful or mysterious object but functions merely as a clerk cataloguing the results of his premise. Sol LeWitt.

And my favourites...

It is perhaps a more fortunate destiny to have a taste for collecting shells than to be born a millionaire. Robert Louis Stevenson.

Art should be born of the material and the tool, and it should retain the mark of the tool and its struggle with the material. Man should speak, but so should the tool and the material. Jean Debuffet.

Found this link to other artists who have produced installations for the Pitt Rivers Museum.

www.prm.ox.ac.uk/pdf/edweb/working%20with%20artists.pdf

And found some other work by Les Biggs. Love these ceramics tools...