www.danishcrafts.org/visArtikel.uk.asp?artikelID=2504
(text below from Danish Crafts website)
Ole Jensen
Born in 1958, ceramist/designer. He graduated as a ceramic designer from the Kolding College of Danish Design in 1985 and from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1990.
Hot Water Bottle is a soft container that can be filled with hot water and placed on or near the body. It is typically used to ease stomach or muscle pain. “Or if you just feel under the weather and need some warmth,” says Ole Jensen, adding that the product is probably “particularly relevant in cold climates and difficult times.”
The product is made in natural rubber and metal by repeatedly dipping a clay shape into liquid rubber. The rubber is treated with a thin layer of silicone for durability. The stopper is handmade in gold-plated brass with a screw thread closure. The hot water bottles are made in five different shapes in brown or red.
Hot Water Bottles are produced by Latex One and Lars Glad in collaboration with Rasha Sager & Saxenfelt Natural Rubber Products.
Since then, Ole Jensen has exhibited in a number of places, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Danish Museum of Art & Design in Copenhagen. At last year’s Mindcraft, Ole Jensen presented The Rubber Tub – an oversize version of his rubber washing-up bowl, which is manufactured by Normann Copenhagen, and which is in use in the restaurant at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among many other places.
The long list of manufacturers that Ole has worked with over the years, in addition to Normann Copenhagen, includes Muuto and Royal Copenhagen.
The main source of inspiration for Ole Jensen’s products is his attention to everyday life and his close surroundings. This is reflected, among other things, in his preference for working with practical objects that relate to everyday life and the body. He develops these things almost as if they were craft objects: by hand, in clay and other readily available materials. Always mindful of whether the process gives rise to a rationale or a phenomenon that might later be transformed with a view to serial production.
Filed under: ****GO*******, design, exhibition, ideas, urbanism, wanted to go but didn't.. (or couldn't!)
Torino 10122
A project and competition, Torino Geodesign is first and foremost an idea which defines an extraordinarily large and productive field of action: self-determined design, produced in limited series by communities inside huge globalised metropolises.
Design arising from a community of users organising restricted mass production to rapidly meet specific sorts of limited demand destined for instantaneous diffusion.
Vital, energetic and deeply experimental design, produced using poor materials and technology deriving from informal economies, and often full of symbolic content.
Highly creative design, which moves beyond the restrictive boundaries of international luxury production and meets precise needs linked to immediate survival or to lifestyles under constant change.
The project Torino Geodesign revolves around the collaboration between 40 communities in the area and a similar number of international designers and Italian companies.
Focusing attention on people instead of objects, Torino Geodesign aims to trigger off new forms of business enterprise in various local communities by setting up an intricate network of relations in which there is a blurring of the distinctions between customers and users, manufacturers and beneficiaries of design. In a dynamic system, a far cry from the idea of free aid or support, the designer becomes the catalyst of all kinds of experiments and reactions deriving from new forms of interaction.
The challenge behind this complex mechanism, where the traditional division of roles between the commissioning client, the designer and the consumer are tested, subverted and recomposed, is of an obviously political and social nature. The project aims in fact to seek out new energy for the world of design and new models for the relationship between city dwellers and city administration based on activating collective energy.
The designers, artists and architects, chosen through an international idea-seeking competition, work together with the communities in a series of design workshops on varying themes identified through a flexible, experimental process (magazines, packaging, brand images, objects for large-scale production such as clothes horses for council housing, the reorganisation of public areas).
The prototypes – together with sketches, designs, film and photos of the entire process – flow into a major show, the evidence of a new systematic way of organising design.
OPENING HOURS:
Sunday – Wednesday 10-19
Thursday – Saturday 10-23
free entry
Filed under: ****GO*******, architecture, art, book/ magazine, design, exhibition, symposium, talk/ lecture, urbanism
Filed under: architecture, art, design, education, festival/feria, ideas, photography, travel, urbanism, web
Situated bang in the centre of Mumbai, Dharavi is otherwise known as the largest slum in Asia. With a population estimated at over 600,000 people, the informal settlement turns over an estimated £700 million per year in it’s formal and informal industries.
The land itself is worth over US$2 billion in real estate.
The Urban Typhoon Workshop will be held in March 2008, and will focus on Dharavi’s Koliwada community as part of a global workshop on participatory design, brainstorming potential development strategies for Koliwada.
Further information regarding context, data, workshop schedules & how to participate can be found at Urban Typhoon’s website: www.urbantyphoon.com
Photos Ⓒ Antonia Halse 2007
Filed under: ****GO*******, architecture, art, design, exhibition, film & video, graphic design, photography
The Architecture of Yemen @ RIBA
Celebrating the rich building traditions and architecture of Yemen, most famously the extraordinary multi-storey buildings that constitute the heart of many Yemeni cities, dating back hundreds of years but continually renewed and rebuilt by their inhabitants – an interesting example of living sustainable architecture that is both traditional and contemporary – and represented here by a series of spectacular models. The exhibition focuses on four major provinces; Dali’, Yafi’, Shabwah and Hadramut, and explores how this building culture – including the contribution made by master builders and inhabitants in the design process – and the fabric and environment of Yemeni towns itself, is increasingly under-threat from commercial construction and corporate urban development.
A new book ‘The Architecture of Yemen from Yafi’ to Hadramut by architect Salma Samar Damluji (Laurence King Publishing), will be launched at the Exhibition.
Anthony McCall @ Serpentine Gallery
until 3rd Feb 08
British artist Anthony McCall (born 1946) has a cross-disciplinary practice in which film, sculpture, installation, drawing and performance overlap. McCall was a key figure in the avant-garde London Film-makers Co-operative in the 1970s and his earliest films are documents of outdoor performances that were notable for their minimal use of the elements, most notably fire.
After moving to New York in 1973, McCall continued his fire performances and developed his ‘solid light’ film series, conceiving the now-legendary Line Describing a Cone, in 1973. These works are simple projections that strikingly emphasise the sculptural qualities of a beam of light. In darkened, haze-filled rooms, the projections create an illusion of three-dimensional shapes, ellipses, waves and flat planes that gradually expand, contract or sweep through space. In these works, the artist sought to deconstruct cinema by reducing film to its principle components of time and light and removing the screen entirely as the prescribed surface for projection. The works also shift the relationship of the audience to film, as viewers become participants, their bodies intersecting and modifying the transitory forms.
At the end of the 1970s, McCall withdrew from making art. Over 20 years later, he acquired a new dynamic and re-opened his ‘solid light’ series, this time using digital projectors rather than 16mm film. Through his involvement in expanding the notion of cinema, which enabled a more complex experience of projection, McCall has become a hero to a younger generation of artists working with film and installation.
A renewed interest in his work has resulted in many screenings of his individual projections at museums and galleries internationally, as well as inclusion in major group exhibitions, such as Into the Light: the Projected Image in American Art, 1964-77, Whitney Museum, New York, 2001-02; X-Screen: The Expanded Screen: Actions and Installations of the Sixties and Seventies, Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, 2003-4; Expanded Cinema: Film as Spectacle, Event, Performance, Hartware Medien Kunstverein, Dortmund, 2004; Eyes, Lies and Illusions, Hayward Gallery, London, 2004; The Expanded Eye, Kunsthaus Zürich, 2006, and Projections: Beyond Cinematic Space, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 2006-07.
His work is largely unknown to the wider British public and the Serpentine exhibition offers an overview of both the early and more recent works of this seminal practitioner. The exhibition also features previously unseen drawings, studies, scores, photographs and documents, predominantly from the artist’s own archive, that offer an insight into his working practice.
The exhibition is organised by the Serpentine Gallery, London, and presented in association with the Musée départemental d’art contemporain de Rochechouart, France.
http://www.serpentinegallery.org/2007/04/anthony_mccalldecember_2007_ja.html
Mapping the Imagination @ V&A
until 27th April ‘08
Maps are simplified schematic diagrams that employ a universal visual language through which we codify and comprehend our world. We all use maps in our daily lives as sources of information about places, routes, networks and boundaries. They offer us the means of describing and understanding the intangible too – everything from air routes and constellations to states of mind.
Although mapping is a method of gathering, ordering and recording knowledge, all maps are to some extent the products of imagination. No map is ever the truly objective description of a place that it purports to be. Every map is shaped – and coloured – by political, cultural and social conditions, and by the personal experience or imaginative projections of its maker.
This display includes maps made to inform or to entertain, maps enhanced by imaginative embellishments, maps that show imaginary places, and works in which artists have adapted map iconography to express their ideas and experiences of place.
http://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/future_exhibs/mapping_imagination/index.html
**NEW ADDITION**
Daniel Eatock – Editions & Originals @ Kemistry Gallery
until 12th January
Kemistry Gallery is delighted to announce the first solo show by Daniel Eatock.
Entitled ‘Editions & Originals’ the show presents a collection of works and ideas
in a multitude of permutations, all linked by the belief in concept first.
Eatock is interested in connections between image and language, titles, punch
lines, miscommunication, subversions, open systems, contributions from others,
seriality, collections, discovery and inventing. Eatock makes conceptual things
that are resolved in a reductive, logical and objective way, and is especially
interested in the connection of the start and end points of a hand drawn circle.
Eatock’s work responds to personal fascinations and the desire to invent, discover
and present. From an edition of prints made using every colour Pantone felt-tip
pen, to the ongoing Channel 4’s Big Brother identity, all work is unified in its
conceptual, reductive, rational attempt at forming an answer or a conclusion. The
simple notion that work made without a brief is ‘art’ and work made in response
to a brief is ‘design’, does not fit, art and design cross, merge and collide
challenging preconceptions from each respective discipline.
Kemistry Gallery
http://www.kemistrygallery.co.uk/
See more info on Daniel Eatock’s Alternative Olympic Logo (above) and other projects on his website:
Video from the conference is now online http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=UrbanAge
Filed under: architecture, book/ magazine, design, exhibition, wanted to go but didn't.. (or couldn't!)
Can’t believe I missed this! Luckily the website has a lot of information, just click on the magazine covers and a pop-up will tell you more about the publication..
Planeta Fresco No. 1, Dec 1967, Milan
Forum, July 1967, Amsterdam
Clip-kit, London, 1966
Ekistics, April 1965, Athens
Check out Alex’s website if you missed the exhibition: www.aalex.info
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from the GRADUAL press release:
Royal College of Art Graduate exhibition for London Design Festival 2007
In collaboration with the Brompton Design Project Martino Gamper will
select work from the last three years by graduates from the Design Products department, offering an insight into the design process of the graduates.
Grad*u*al adj.
Proceeding or developing slowly by steps or degrees; a way of changing slowly…
The emphasis of the exhibition is to reveal the process through generating and experimenting rather than finishing and polishing work.
The exhibition space, 1st floor, 5 Cromwell Place, will be transformed into a temporary laboratory for gradual development of ideas and processes, where the viewer will have the advantage of engaging with the designer in the process.
