design

Sand Circles

Posted by hil

SandAnalogia (Andres Amador) has a lovely gallery of large scale sand circle patterns, made on the beaches of San Fransisco. The patterns are made by raking the sand , exposing the wetter, and therefore darker, sand underneath. Phidelity has other images of the same circles, and includes some designs to be considered for future circles. Glen Tregurtha in New Zealand is also a sand artist, and his gallery is here. I can understand liking the impermanence, seeing it washed away, rather like the Tibetan monks that spend days making intricate sand mandalas, and then brush it all up in minutes.

Updated 2015: some links broken.

Artist Trading Cards

Posted by hil

I’ve been making a few artist trading cards: an edition of just three. One of them is in exchange for Mimi‘s night baby.

atcy

Close-ups below.

I find the concept of artist trading cards quite seductive. It must be the idea of miniature art, like stamps and other mailart. But I am also wary of getting into it, on time grounds alone.

For a long time I wanted to make an installation – sometimes I still do! – with the little images I did for The Republic of Pemberley years ago. (Some of them were money and stamps invented for that imaginary world, featuring Colin Firth’s Darcy from Pride and Prejudice, but those particular ones are not online at the moment). The idea was to print and frame the pictures at the scale they were made – 200 x 150 pixels – and then exhibit them in a purpose-built miniature gallery. The way you would view them would be through peep holes, or being able to pop you head up into the individual gallery rooms from underneath. The idea connects into ideas I have long played around with, to do with how cyberspace impacts on our understandings of public and private space.

atc3 atc2 atc1

Japanese Manhole Cover Patterns

Posted by hil

Manhole_Cover_Hiroshima_08.thumb
Frangipani has a gallery of some beautiful manhole covers in Japan. Some of them are very colourful.

Updated 2015: links broken, but google them :)

Stencilling Carpet

Posted by hil

My husband’s grandfather had a wide notion of what might be fixed with paint, and it got more extensive as he got older, until he was happily fixing stains in upholstery and carpets with dabs of paint. I’ve been thinking about him today, because I have been spraypainting a border pattern onto a large piece of carpet which is to be used in a play. The design was cut as a stencil:

Stencil design

Stencil cutting

Making of Nature Band Parade Puppets

Posted by hil

Over at Puppetry Australia, Sean Manners has put together a pictorial account of the building of the parade puppets for Nature Band, a community puppet project that ran as part of the One Van Puppetry Festival earlier in the year, held in Blackheath in the Blue Mountains out of Sydney. The puppets, five yellow-tailed black cockatoos, four trees and three
waratahs, were made by participants in community workshops that were held over several months.

‘The puppets were initially designed by Jenny Kee; realized by Paula Martin, a local designer and sculptor; the workshops were facilitated by Sean Manners, puppeteer and community artist; and the performance and project as a whole was directed and choreographed by Sue Wallace of Sydney Puppet Theatre.’

The Victory Theatre Cafe and Antique Centre in Blackheath has a cool community mural along one side, that surely must also have been designed by Kenny Kee:

There is also a bus shelter on the edge of Blackheath that I liked because it has been painted to celebrate the puppetry festival (click on the thumbnails for larger images):

'One Van' Bus stop mural
'One Van' Bus stop mural

I heard the distinctive yellow-tailed black cockatoo calls when I was in Blackheath. They are wonderful birds, quite big – about 60cm – and I always feel its a good omen when they are about, though their calls are somewhat plaintive. In Canberra it used to be quite rare to see these cockatoos, but since the devastating bushfires in January 2003 they have moved into the suburbs. A few weeks ago, we had the first ones in our garden. They spent several hours ripping the bark and branches of a dying gum tree to bits in search of borer insects.

Kamon&#233

Posted by hil

Kamone1Oh yeah, the World EXPO also has a pavilion mascot, a platypus called Kamoné. She was designed by Melbourne-based illustrator, artist, toy designer and storyteller Nathan Jurevicius, best known for his Scarygirl series of toys, comics and products.

The drawings are pretty cool and there are various versions of her: dancing, just herself, in a long dress, playing soccer, with ipod and backpack, with tote and pencil, as an artist? (interestingly this isn’t used – maybe its not clear enough), and as a scientist.

There is also a bodysuit puppet of her. There are numerous pictures in the Australian Pavilion image gallery, such as this one of her supervising the unloading of the platypus exhibit (minus her gloves). And here Kamoné is at Tokyo Station, meeting her friends the official Aichi Expo mascots, Kiccoro and Morizo, a forest child and a forest grandfather.

One other thing. There is nice flash graphic at EXPO2005, though its a pity you have to scroll down to get both images.

Japanese Design Motifs

Posted by hil

ButterflyMeggiecat is a constant source of interesting art-craft-image-related notes. Her link to Japanese Free Clip Art the other day provided this lovely swallowtail butterfly image, for instance.

The designs reminded me of a book called ‘Snow, Wave, Pine:Traditional patterns in Japanese Design’ by Motoji Niwa and Sadao Hibi, which I sometimes page through in the bookshop. Its a beautiful collection of photographs of classic decorative patterns on a wide variety of objects (for example robes, laquerware, swords and ceramics), and many drawings of family crests and stylized motifs.

Puppetry Daemons in ‘His Dark Materials’

Posted by hil

By all accounts the two-part 6 hour stage adaptation of Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials is absolutely stunning. I think it has had two seasons at the National Theatre in London: one in 2003, and a second that finished earlier this month.

The daemons, physical manifestations of the human soul in the shape of animals that reflect a person’s character, are puppets. They were designed by Michael Curry, who is perhaps best known for the puppets in The Lion King. Stagework has an extensive website on the adaptation, and its possible to see a few of the initial designs there, and glimpses of the puppetry in some of the video clips:

Operating the golden monkey
Lyra meets Mrs Coulter
Cittagazee performance
Captured by bears
Lyra and Iorek (scene in rehearsal)

In both these and the puppets in ‘The Lion King’, I think the magic lies in how the overall shape and actions of the creatures are suggested. Often the puppeteers are built into the shape in unexpected ways, and they use their whole bodies to make the animal move. In ‘The Lion King’, for instance, the puppeteers playing the hyenas held the hyena heads low down and at arms length, while their own heads provided the high shoulder line that is so distinctive in a hyena’s overall shape. Likewise, the polar bears in ‘His Dark Materials’, are defined by a puppeteer holding a head mask in one hand and a great clawed paw in the other, with just the suggestion of great shoulders in what looks like a flexible curved line between the two, and a powerful lumbering gait.

Bridge to the stars, which looks as if its the natural online home for ‘His Dark Materials’ fans, has a section on the stage adaptation, including a guide to the Stagework site, images and reviews.

Hooray for two-dollar shops!

Posted by hil

Tacky but interesting: this is a huge spider garden spike that I got at the $2 shop the other day. It’s a hand span across, and the connections between its legs and body are fine springs, so that when the spike is jolted the legs have an incidental movement. The best movement you can get out of it is a kind of drumming of the legs, where, on each side, legs 1 and 3 are in sync with each other, and legs 2 and 4 are doing the opposite. Then it has the right kind of action for a huntsman spider.

Spider3

I have a couple of other insect garden spikes, a bee and a dragonfly (bought out of curiosity when I was working on making giant bees and dragonflies a few years ago). They are much smaller than the spider, with bodies about 7 cm long, and the wings are on double springs. The dragonfly has much lighter springs, and a much better incidental movement than the poor bee, whose springs and wings are way too heavy.