Sandbanks, Dorset: In an earlier light

I previously blogged about Sandbanks, that strip of land at the meeting-point of affluence and sparkling tides, a little while ago. (See Sandbanks Dorset:The light fantastic.)

Sandbanks holds a part of my own childhood, but my Sandbanks memories are simply memories of the British seaside. I was therefore fascinated to discover these images of old postcards of Sandbanks (from the collection of Bournemouth historian Alwyn Ladell). I now know that my childhood visits were not in the time before the golden age of Sandbanks, but more like a quiet lull between two separate 'golden ages', because Sandbanks had a previous flowering in the 1920's and 1930's.

This wonderful series of images by Alwyn Ladell, of which these are just a few, depicts a time between the wars when the great, the good and the colorful found the life of this tiny spit of land. These images show a place which was more open, more bleak and more tranquil than the Sandbanks of today. They show the sand dunes which gave the area its name, not yet built on and covered forever. They show white pebble-dashed houses, a handful of cars and the pride of discovery.

What the Sandbanks of today and the place in these images share is the same clear, cool, brilliant light. Somehow, I can't keep away. 

1 The Haven, Sandbanks, c1905. 2 East Looe House, 151 Banks Road, Sandbanks, the home of Mr and Mrs P Allen, c1930. 3 The Haven Hotel c1933. All images of postcards by Alwyn Ladell via Flickr under CC BY license.

Pip and Pop and the pastel rainbow

Pip and Pop is the pseudonym not of two people but of the one Tanya Schulz, Australian artist and creator of sugar-coated dreams. In a world where 'art' is too often obliged to be dark or heavy or complex or obscure, Pip and Pop feeds us with unapologetic delight. With installations by the name of Candylab and We Miss You Magic Land! she reignites and celebrates the child in us all. With a  palette of materials  from sugar to glitter, plastic to candy she unashamedly embraces the kitsch and shows no signs of stopping.

Pip and Pop's  colour palette  is a pastel rainbow of every saccharin hue you ever saw. Her forms are mystical mounds of sugar, fluffy pink trees, softly lit gradients suggesting worlds beyond the sugar mountains.

I saw a Dream Like This, Standing in the Sky and Love Grows a Flower are just a few of the sticky-sweet fantasy installations which Tanya Schulz has brought the world. All of them take us to other worlds, fairy dreams and all of them remind us these places are for us all, not just for children. Tanya Schulz has the honesty to show us what she really loves. I wonder if maybe that's unusual.

1, 2 and 3 Pip and Pop's Art Candy Installation, Amsterdam, 2014. All images by Willem Velthoven from Flickr under CC BY license.

Barneville-Carteret: Wild in the warm wind

A couple of weeks ago serendipity brought me to the twin communities of Barneville and Carteret on a wonderful stretch of the French Normandy coast, the Cotentin Peninsula. In a warm strong breeze, and from its wild dunes, Barneville-Carteret looks across to the Channel Island of Jersey.

It is Barneville-Carteret's juxtaposition with the Gulf Stream which gives it its mild winters - typically just seven days of frost each year. In turn this allows Mediterranean plants, exotics and palm trees to flourish here. Gentle dry grasses blow in the pale sand and weathered sticks in the dunes are bleached by the the sun. This does not feel like northern France. 

The vast open dunes and beaches of this magical stretch of coast, the pale simple houses, share everything in common with the Channel Islands, and are unlike any other part of Normandy. Quite simply, one of France's most accessible coasts is a world away.

1 Beach, Carteret, watercolour by Monica Alisse  2 and 3 Views from the height of Cap Carteret, by Phil Beard. All images from Flickr under CC BY license.

Flore Nove-Josserand: Birmingham and a new installation

This week the latest installation by Parisian-born visual artist Flore Nove-Josserand will arrive, appropriately, into the urban jungle that is Birmingham's Digbeth. The work is called City Growth Blues: It's about a frenzied city of a million people and her vision for its future.

The single thread running through Flore Nove-Josserand's prolific work would seem to be to her mission to get us to look at our world in ways we've never looked at it before. People have spoken of the"unsettling subversions" within her work, the "slightly disturbing irregularities." Her installations have always been site-specific, a reaction to a particular space. It's said that only by experiencing them can you fully comprehend her messages.

Image 3 is named 'Late at Night', and typically it uses everything from tinfoil to pins. It's one of a series called The Hours - mostly they depict different times of day, however, one is quite simply called 'Tomorrow'. A little glimpse of tomorrow sneaking into the present - is that what this exhibition will do?

City Growth Blues opens at Eastside Projects  in Birmingham on 19 September 2015 until 12 December 2015 (with a public preview on 18 September,  6-8pm)

1 Listen to Me, fluid collage with 2x Signorina magnets and assorted papers, 2015.  2 Late at Night from a series called The Hours, 2011. 3 Taster of "City Growth Blues, 2015

Images by kind permission of Flore Nove-Josserand.

Blobs and globules

I do think there is something fundamentally endearing about all things blob-shaped, so here are a few for your perusal.

The egg-in-a-field with the mysterious  ORANGE GLOW  is the work of dmvA-architects of Belgium. Fashioned almost entirely from polyester, and amazingly containing a small kitchen and even a bathroom, as well as sleeping and storage spaces, it was intended to provide extension space to homes or offices.The  WONDROUSLY GREEN  inflatables seen nestling so insouciantly into the columns of the Carriage House at the Evergreen Museum, Baltimore are by Canadian artist Sharon Engelstein. The freedom of her forms is the only constant in her amazing work. The  PINK, WHITE AND GREY  blobs, snuggling up in a corner, are a rendering by Mark Leichliter of Boston, Colorado.

1 Blob VB3 by dmvA-architects, image by Forgemind Archimedia 2 Green Balloons at the Evergreen Museum, Baltimore, Maryland by Sharon Engelstein , image by Romana Klee  3 Blob-Room in concrete, by Mark Leichliter.  All images from Flickr under CC BY license.

Close-up design inspiration

It's easy to forget how looking at everyday things at close quarters reveals whole fantasy worlds of design inspiration. There is  a wealth of ideas here which would scale up to be....well, just about anything, certainly interiors. These beautiful images are by Eric J Paparatto of New Jersey, USA.

All images by Eric J Paparatto of New Jersey, USA, from Flickr under CC BY license.

 

Inside-outside space: Ambiguity and green furniture

Inside-outside space has leaped up the wish-list of modern design. We have lives which force us inside more than ever. Inside-outside space is a way of fighting back. It substitutes our psychological and physiological need for the great outdoors. We've maybe all seen different ways of achieving it; gardens which 'flow' through walls, outdoor 'rooms', indoor gardens. The elements in these photos are whimsical and fun - they bring a new angle to inside-outside space. They are engagingly ambiguous. Oh, and they make me smile!

1 Artificial grass-covered chair, on stand at Grand Designs, ExCel. Image by Paul Wilkinson. 2 & 3 Garden by Chris Deakin and Jason Lock for House of Fraser at 2014 RHS Chelsea Flower Show, Silver Medal winner. Images by Karen Roe. All from Flickr under CC BY license.

Going back to Memphis: Ettore Sottsass

The word Memphis takes me back to my time in set design at the BBC when any studio design worth its salt took Memphis as its inspiration, and was mapped in myriad geometric shapes in a palette of complementary colours applied to shapes that looked straight out of the nearest toyshop. Memphis was complex, it looked crazy, but it was always cheerful.

Memphis was an Italian design group which was brought together in Milan by the iconic architect and designer Ettore Sottsass, who was probably most famous for designing the Olivetti typewriter. The name Memphis was arbitrary: The group simply took it from the title of the Dylan track that was playing during their first meeting. In the brief window of time of no more than about six years when they came together, from 1981 until 1987, the group designed and exhibited furniture and objects that exemplified post-modernism which defined that time.

Is their quirky eccentricity forever to be discarded to the mercy of the history books? Absolutely not, I would say.  Perhaps it is this summer's tide of pastel fashion which set my mind wandering back to Memphis's heyday. Those fresh colours are a feast for the senses.

I have made the happy discovery that Memphis never actually disappeared, it is alive and well in Milan and has a website Memphis Milano from which it sells its original designs.

We are still locked into an age of minimalism, with the complex and the illogical pared out of every detail. Within that minimalist framework we feel now the need to add a few drops of the purely irrational. I think it could be time to revisit Memphis. 

1 Ceramic teapot 'Colorado' designed in 1983 by Marco Zanini via Memphis Milano 

 2 Table 'Mimosa', plastic laminate with glass top,  designed in 1984 by Ettore Sottsass via Memphis Milano.  3 Room collection of Memphis Milano. Photo by Dennis Zanone via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY license.

RSC exhibitions: Moving walls, shifting rice

The Royal Shakespeare Theatre, on the riverbank of Stratford upon Avon,  currently has three interactive artworks vying for attention with a roomful of....er...piles of rice.

The piles of rice are the work of theatre group Stan's Cafe, who have measured the grains in each pile to represent a selection of human statistics. It is unexpectedly powerful. The juxtaposition of the tiny heap representing the population of Stratford with the massively bigger heap representing its visitors in one year is a staggering revelation of the nature of this town. Some measures are more political. Every one is thought-provoking. For immediacy and an added punch the exhibition is constantly changing to keep the comment current.

Downstairs around the foyers you'll find the three Living Walls exhibits, the work of international design group Squidsoup. I think two of them are interactive - if you wander around the shapes kind of follow you. It's a fun trick that gets well utilised in interior design. The blocks tumbling down the steps are good to watch - I think all three works may be at their best viewed after dark for the strongest images.

Living Walls will be at the RSC until 9 September and Stan's Cafe will be there until 31 July.

1 Squidsoup:Living Walls at RSC, image from Squidsoup on Flickr under CC BY License

 2 and 3 Stan's Cafe:Of all the People in the World, image via RSC exhibitions

Watching flowers in the rain

It has been raining for days here around Stratford upon Avon. It abated briefly for Stratford to party the Olympic torch through  town on Sunday, but the last three months have been the wettest we've ever had. 

Everything has it's up side. 'And I will walk and talk in gardens all wet with rain', is a line I've always loved from Van Morrison's Sweet Thing. There is something pure, fresh and cathartic about a wet garden.

These beautiful images are the work of Audrey JM from Pennsylvania, USA, who has taken countless hundreds of photographs of raindrops. I chose these.

 

1 Underneath web 2 Purple reflections 3 Leaves reflecting in drops

 All by Audrey JM from Flickr under CC BY license

RSC exhibition: Tiny boxes of Stratford upon Avon

My RSC Gallery is an enchanting exhibition of tiny artworks at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon - and the most enchanting thing of all? They're all hidden in tiny boxes all over the theatre - you have to actually go looking for them! My daughter thought it was brilliant - a sort of cross between a treasure hunt and a giant advent calendar. The contents of the boxes are all different peoples views of Stratford upon Avon, it's theatre or it's plays. Some are pictures, some embroidery, some 3D, all completely different, but every one of them teeny-weeny. The exhibition's on at the moment and I don't think it's about to go away (check My RSC Gallery for details). Oh, and another good thing, except for a few boxes hidden in the 'tour' part of the theatre it's completely free. Go have fun!

 

1 Whirls of Thought by Jenny Crowe 2 A Map of Shakespeare by Clare Brierley 3 Gold by Dawn Pinfold

All via RSC Royal Shakespeare Company

Interiors versus installations: The Third Space, Munich

Hunting for exciting, inspirational interiors for this blog I chanced upon these pictures of an exhibition in Munich, Germany, entitled the Third Space. Some quick stats about it, just for the record: It was, the description says, the work of 52 interior design students who built it from one million, three hundred thousand cable ties in a space of two hundred square metres, and it took them sixteen thousand eight hundred and seventy hours. Goodness. Phew.

My daughter and I were at an Easter art session this week - theme was art inspired by nature.  And this art too is a dream that's sprung from nature. People who experienced it must have tasted life as tiny people in a giant garden.

So I was searching for an exciting, inspirational interior and instead you got this - not an 'interior' but an 'installation'. And that's my point - so-called interiors tend to be, well, just plain banal. If only 'interiors' achieved this level of fantasy. Interiors versus installations? Give me installations every time! What do you think?

 

 

All photos of The Third Space Exhibition, Munich, 2008

 by Martin aka mx2-foto

 from Flickr under CC BY License