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Bic Cristal pen manufacturd by Societe PPA, 1950, pp.126 - 129 Polypropylene Chair designed by Robin Day, 1960-1963. pp. 130-131
No full textThese two chapters explore the development of two products and the reasons why they have acquired iconic status.
The Bic Cristal pen has been with us for more than sixty years. When launched, an average of 10,000 were sold daily in France. Now many millions are sold daily in more than 160 countries. Few brands share such logevity or geographical penetration, and no other pen has sold in such abundance. Its iconicity is further evidenced by its addition to leading museum collections,including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2001, and the Pompidou Centre, Paris,in 2006, and its inclusion in such design compendiums as 'Phaidon Design Classics', 2006. Significcant also is its use as inspiration for the design of other artefacts, as in the lamp illustrated.
The Polypropylene chair was immeditately recogised as something special. Within weeks of its launch in April 1963 the 'Architects' Journal' reported: 'This excellent solution to the multipurpose side chair will certainly prove to be the most significant development in British mass produced design since the war'. The same year it won the Duke of Edinburgh's Award for elegant design, a first for a plastic product, and was acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum, the UK's national museum of art and design. Nonetheless, no one could have foreseen its prolific future: that it would come to be manufactured globally in mulitiple millions, that it would be used in such diverse locations as Mexico's Olympic stadium and in Botswana in dug-out tree trunk canoes; that it would be widely copied and that it would still be in production and seen as 'of today', fifty years later. Its literal stamp of approval was its appearance on a Royal Mail first class stamp in a 2009 series, British Design Classics
Edge:Lands
Get PDFPaul Gough is interested in drawing in-between places, liminal zones, waste grounds, empty places that were once something and now have been allowed to lapse back into their habitual shape. Look at his drawings of the former airbase at Greenham Common, or the ash-heaps of the old north Somerset coalfield, the abandoned village of Tyneham or the forlorn gullies on the Gallipoli Peninsula. They are powerful evocations of absence and embedded memory. Writer Marion Shoard coined these unloved, unseen and often unexplored spaces as the ‘edge land’, a mysterious hinterland of brick piles and rubbish tips, derelict industrial plant and ragged landfill, forlorn filling stations and scruffy allotments, abandoned ordnance lying amidst rogue plants.
Thirty years ago, the naturalist Richard Mabey in his book ‘The Unofficial Countryside ‘, had also opened our eyes to the vitality of these unkempt places. He, however, found little to cherish and celebrate in these wasted hinterlands. Instead he marvelled at the resilience of nature in such abject conditions, its refusal to be ground down by toxic contagion
The Arcadian Library: Bindings and Provenance
No full textThe Arcadian Library, based in London, is one of the finest collections of books reflecting European interest in the Arab and Islamic worlds. Among its c.10,000 volumes are many copies with important provenances and fine bindings. In this companion volume to no. 8 in the series, six distinguished authorities on the history of book-collecting and the ownership and use of books, and the history of bookbinding, deal with significant aspects of the Library's holdings from these varied perspectives.The scholarly essays in this volume are complemented by a very large number of specially commissioned photographs, making available a wealth of comparative evidence and new examples of particular bindings, details of decoration, inscriptions and marks of ownership
‘Planting Memory’: the Challenge of Remembering the Past on the Somme, Gallipoli and Melbourne
Get PDFIn exploring the mnemonic role of gardens, this paper will first focus on the value of gardens as both a palliative for melancholy, as liminal enclaves, and as carefully constructed surrogate memory systems. Their importance as places for reflection and recovery is examined through the lens of post-war Flanders, with a brief examination of the immense task required to recover the land from the trauma of the First World War. The paper then examines the manner in which pilgrims and veterans took their personal narratives to the battle zones. With so little to see, the bereaved had to reclaim lost names from the lost land; this process is explored through the work of the gardeners who had to ‘plant’ memory and to architects who designed vast monuments to enumerate those who had simply vanished without trace. Noting Fabian Ware’s transformational contribution to this process, this paper examines how the sites of battle became named and reclaimed, how shallow ditches and slight mounds were rendered sites of reverence, and how garden cemeteries have become the epicentres of ritual remembering. Two ‘mirror’ sites of national memory are examined – the ‘Anzac’ headland in Turkey, and the Memorial parkland and gardens of Shrine Reserve in central Melbourne, both hallowed places strewn with symbolic trees, designed gardens and abundant rhetorical ‘topoi’. They are also places where the seed and soil of distant battlefields has been mingled with the national landscape, where the front has literally been transplanted to another country. The paper concludes by suggesting that the garden memorial is an essential component in the future of remembering, creating open and inclusive spaces which rely on participation and careful nurturing to ensure that memory stays alert, relevant, and passed on from generation to generation
The book as a tunnel
No full textThrough our first repeated interaction with books, we come to recognize elements recurring in these experiences, such as: verso and recto pages, covers, spine, etc., as well as relations between these elements (front/back, part/whole, etc.). Such interaction enables us to construct abstracted mental representations of the book, which are simpler than any single physical instantiation, but indicative of many other books. This schematization provides the basis for a range of structures and pathways that can be linked, or mapped, onto text and imagery in both conventional and unconventional ways. Through metaphor and metonymy basic concepts evoked by schematic book-form can link with words and images to make new meaning. Therefore, rather than thinking of the book page as simply a substrate onto which the printed word is inscribed, it can be understood, for example, as a slice of time and/or space, and such an understanding provides opportunities for making associations with text and imagery. Consequently, the book is not a neutral carrier of meaning but can prompt the reader to think in particular ways about how information is presented. This essay will explore the book-form as a source of schematic structure that can be linked and blended with other elements to instantiate texts in diverse and creative ways. Using ideas from conceptual metaphor theory and conceptual blending theory, it will focus on one metaphorical understanding of the book: book is tunnel, to highlight possibilities for integrating book-form with book texts.
The tunnel-book is a format that has been explored by book artists in which apertures are cut into pages suggesting movement through, rather than around pages. This essay discuses a book produced as part of an ongoing PhD project that uses the same understanding of cutting through the book but instead seeks to evoke this understanding through imagery and the conventional codex rather than through piercing the book page and utilizing the tunnel-book format. An account is provided of how conceptions of moving through a tunnel are projected onto experiences of moving through a book and the ways in which these domains of experience can additionally be blended with other metaphorical journeys, in this case involving a progression through a course of postgraduate study
Confronting plastics preservation
No full textSince the 1970s, more products have been made of plastics than any other materials group. Thus all museums with 20th and 21st century collections whether focused on art or science contain large numbers of objects made of or with components of plastics. However the plastics material group contains a very large number of different types of materials that are more or less vulnerable, react differently to the environment and degrade in different ways. As a result different plastics need different conditions. These are important because after manufacture they are the single most important contributor to a plastics object’s life expectancy.
Preservation of plastics remains an underdeveloped area in conservation. There have been significant international research projects relating to plastics preservation including the EU-funded PopART (2008-12) and the Getty’s on-going Preservation of Plastics but these are aimed at specialist plastics conservators from scientific backgrounds. Creation of this resource required the identification of ways of translating this research into day-to-day curatorial practice. It involved a series of collaborative stages with the participation of sample potential users, including an online survey; a seminar; creation of the resource, including 18 case studies detailing the degradation of specific objects made of different plastics common in heritage collections with achievable guidelines for their care; and peer review of the resource.
This resource was developed to meet a need formulated by members of the Plastics Subject Specialist Network, drawn from more than 50 UK universities, museums and other heritage bodies. Web rather than paper publication makes it more readily available, provides ongoing access to the seminar papers by video, and allows users to take the path through it that best suits their needs. It is already a primary point of reference for museums and galleries and will, in time, contribute significantly to enhanced care of heritage collections
Shakespeare, Pedagogy and Dyslexia
Get PDFAbstract
In this article, the author reports on her early research into understanding dyslexia, observing its characteristics and affect on some acting students in their work, and discusses ideas for supporting dyslexic acting students in their performance of Shakespeare. Three Acting degree students assessed as dyslexic are presented as case studies in their observed behaviour and the author shares ideas for further action research. The author reports on the students’ strengths and difficulties arising from dyslexia in their reading, understanding and speaking of Shakespeare’s text towards performance. Disclosing challenges the students have met in engaging with the text, and challenges the author faced as their teacher in endeavouring to assist them, the article incudes descriptions of teaching methods that have succeeded or failed in this task.
Having shared the students’ work with six specialist who possess various aspects of expertise involved in dyslexia, the experts comment on the student case studies and their particular challenges. Their expertise is in neurology, dyslexia research, linguistics, speech therapy, the acting of Shakespeare and educational psychology. Several explanations are given in regard to how dyslexia manifests itself in the individuals’ work and processes, and ideas for teaching are offered in supporting acting students with dyslexia. Finally, the author shares her ideas for future investigations and testing specific teaching strategies during her PhD research
‘A Faux Monument’: Guerilla Interventions and the contestation of rhetorical public space
Get PDFSeemingly random acts of violence are occasionally acted upon monuments, memorials, and public icons of commemoration. On occasion, however, the rhetorical topography of cities arouses dialogue and interaction, especially at times of national or global crisis. Drawing on the theoretical work of Boyer and Matsuda, we explore the contested dialogues of commemoration as acts that go beyond evaluation, judgment, and of utterance, to become dia- logic, interventionist, and (in extremis) auto-destructive. This article uses as a case study the creation of an artwork masquerading as a temporary memorial, which was constructed by an artist as a work about commemoration rather than as a commemoration in itself. However, due to the particular circum- stances of its timing, coinciding as it did with the bombing of Afghanistan by America and its allies following the Twin Towers terrorist act in New York on 11 September 2001, it took on an unanticipated function. During the course of the show the Faux Cenotaph was written on, added to, subtracted from, and eventually dismantled by unknown hands. It became a locus for numerous expressions of protest with a sequence of interventions by a largely seen set of players, becoming a temporary version of what the Germans call a ‘Denkmal’: a monument that stands as a warning, causing us to meditate on the mistakes of the past, and hopefully to mend our ways. This paper sets out a number of arguments to suggest that following this sequence of unscheduled, and very radical, interventions the piece became a ‘guerilla-memorial’: a rejoinder to both the object and the genre of the monumental memorial itself
Sacrifice the Bird Song
No full textSacrifice the Bird Song
This was a solo exhibition of 19 photographs shown at Centrespace Gallery, Bristol, which selects and showcases the work of contemporary artists and emerging new artists.
Research Questions
Sacrifice the Bird Song explores the plight of British wildlife as it struggles to survive in an environment dominated by the automobile. The work highlights the changing balance of our ecosystem in response to large numbers of road-kill. The work builds upon a previous project by Wenham-Clarke entitled When lives Collide (2006) which focused on those unfortunate people affected by road traffic accidents.
Research Imperatives
Through the use of photography Sacrifice the Bird Song questions our attitude to our own environment and focuses on the direct impact of road-kill on our ecosystem.
The underpinning research was both qualitative and quantitative. Wenham-Clarke researched by making direct contact with wildlife rescue centres that deal on a daily basis with animals injured on the roads. He also made links with conservationists and even taxidermists who collect road kill. The research revealed an apparent serious imbalance in the natural ecosystem. There are very high death rates for some species, but others that rely on carrion are experiencing significant growth in number. The research also highlighted that for some animals such as deer, their top predator is now the car.
The images themselves are designed to be aesthetically pleasing to contrast against the public’s normal preconceived view of road-kill. This is a very deliberate attempt to draw in the viewer and allow them time to absorb the significance of the image and so the issue. Referencing ‘Memento Mori’, ‘Veritas’ and also modern advertising imagery the work explores our own relationship with our environment. With this work Wenham-Clarke asks the fundamental question, “In this modern era in which we give a price to everything, what value do we place upon our own ecosystem?