Author: Alex R

Alex R
Gallery

Return to the Mall


On a lovely sunny winter’s day last week I went up to the Mall Galleries to see the annual show from members of the Society of Designer Craftsmen. It’s always good to check in with the show as there is a wide range of craft, and this year the exhibition seemed packed to the rafters with work. I was pleasantly surprised to see work from two of my former students.

 

I remember teaching Emma Rawson (above left) on my bowlmaking course a good few years ago now and she had a fantastic sense of colour which manifested itself in a couple of really beautiful bowls, images of which I still use in my teaching as examples of former student work. These days she is making exquisite cast house forms which are combined with screenprinting. Fiona Bryer (above right) did a summer school course with me 5 or 6 years ago and then went on to the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham. She exhibited a collection of sculptural pieces cast in lead crystal with are both organic and fluid but also demonstrating superb control over her material.

As I walked around I had half an eye on potential artists for our next Designed | Crafted show in September and I spotted some promising new talent on show, so our artist list will be growing!

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Redefining Handmade?

I nipped out of the studio yesterday to catch the Craft: Redefining Handmade trade show for 2015. It’s been quite a while since I’ve done any trade shows due to some not inconsiderable exhibition fatigue on my part and having too many other things going on, so it seemed high time to go and get myself back in the swing by visiting.

This is the second year of Craft which started in 2014 as a kind offshoot of the Top Drawer / Home trade show. Last year this triumvirate of trade shows was held at the doomed Art Deco sprawl that was the Earls Court Exhibition Centre which is currently being demolished for yet another London ‘quarter’ to be built in its place. Last year the Craft show had been wedged between a pretty awful Top Drawer fashion section and the more exciting Home show. It felt a bit of a hotchpotch and not terribly inspiring, but it was the first attempt by Piyush Suri of Handmade in Britain at putting on a Clarion show.

So I wasn’t expecting too much when I popped in but in its new location in Olympia, Craft seemed a much more confident show. Clarion had assigned it a reasonable space upstairs off the balcony area and it felt intimate without being overwhelming. By contrast Home, the affiliated trade show located downstairs in the main space, felt characterless and corporate and there were some makers there who were probably kicking themselves that they hadn’t switched to Craft.

However I would take issue with Craft‘s flyline – ‘Redefining Handmade’…. unless Piyush is intending to redefine handmade as things made to look like everything else! Three exceptions to this were the work of two makers I know and one I don’t but I like.

The first, Mia Sarosi, was one of our artists for Designed | Crafted and makes porcelain pieces. Her newest work is an exploration of the assumptions of the making process. For example, she deliberately works with over-soft clay to produce tactile, undulating surfaces on which to paint her designs. It was good to catch up with Mia and find out how successful the show had already been for her.

The second, Nicholas Collins, was a glass artist that I was with at Central Saint Martins ten years ago, whom I haven’t seen since, so we had a lot of catching up to do! However Nick’s work preceded him as I’d admired his sleek monochrome pieces online. Seeing them in real life was even better, and his newest piece literally appeared to vibrate with energy and had the same curious optical effect as a Bridget Riley.

Fanny Shorter

And after all that understated monochrome, I got my colour shot from the stand by Fanny Shorter. She’s not a designer I had known about, but I loved her stuff and reading more about her on her website, I could see why – her cushions, prints and homewares are clearly influenced by her very English upbringing and childhood visits to the V&A and the Natural History Museum. The Arts and Crafts influence that I love is clearly there but done in a vibrantly contemporary style.

I was more impressed with Craft: Redefining Handmade that I thought I’d be, so I think I’ll be a new recruit for next year.

Gallery

We are open!

After a very long set up this weekend, Designed | Crafted is finally open for business!

The set up was slightly traumatic, involving a late night furniture set up on Saturday night, a towed car and a midnight trip to the Hackney car pound and then a fourteen hour styling session yesterday to get the space looking right.

I managed to get a few snaps of the space before we left at midnight, but it was looking lovely.


Come along to the Private View tomorrow night (Tuesday 16th December) from 7-9pm.

Society of Designer Craftsmen Gallery, 24 Rivington Street, London EC2A 3DU

See more details of our ten artists at www.designed-crafted.com

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Christmas Baubles

Last weekend we put up our Christmas tree. I thought I’d leave my family with some festive frivolity before heading off to West Dean for the week, so I booked them a session to blow glass Christmas baubles with Michael Ruh, our neighbour and local glass blower.

Michael’s studio is a lovely space in a warren of studios down a little blink-and-you’d-miss-it alley between an Indian takeaway and a bookies in Tulse Hill. We were welcomed by Michael’s wife Natascha who showed us the three options for the glass baubles – a spiral, a speckled or a colour field bauble. They would be blown from glass that had been rolled in granular glass frit which would give them their colour. My son chose a silvery yellow and blue for a spiral bauble and my husband chose an reddish orange and white frit for what I realised, resignedly, was going to be an Arsenal-themed bauble.

Image: MichaelRuh.com
Image: MichaelRuh.com

Then Michael demonstrated how he gathered the glass from the furnace, trimming it with shears, shaping it with a block and beginning to blow air into it to trap a bubble inside the glass. More heating in the furnace and then the hot gather of glass was rolled in the frit before being heated again to melt it in.

Isaac blowing glassThen came the fun part where Michael got each of them to stand on a raised platform ready to blow down the blowpipe while Michael’s assistant shaped the growing bubble of glass in a mold.The bubble was tapped off and a hanging loop was fashioned from a blob of viscous glass placed on top. The finished bauble was marked up with an identifying number and placed in a kiln for annealing over the next 24 hours.

I left my son with instructions to pick up the baubles from Natascha while I was away and I loved seeing the results.

OurBaubles

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Outsparkled

I was thrilled to receive an invitation to arrange a private viewing of Andrew Logan’s fabulous glass work at his home-studio-shop in Bermondsey. We have been visiting his Glasshouse for over ten years now and it will be very sad to see him leave when he goes off to India, as the gorgeous old warehouse-style building will be depressingly be knocked down to clear way for an apartment block.

Anyway there’s no room for depression when looking at Andrew’s joyful, colourful work and I brought three of my Teepee Glass friends who love his work as much as me.

We spent a delicious Saturday afternoon having a private tour of the gallery and house where all manner of wonderful glass artworks were displayed. Colour, mirror, glitter and glass were abundant and after some time we noticed there was also a rather large Christmas tree…. only in Andrew Logan’s place could a fifteen foot Christmas tree be outsparkled by its surroundings!

Portraits of famous friends were everywhere – both in bust form and as flat two-dimensional mirrored faces – and in the midst of a fantastic pearled statue group I spotted a stunning self portrait in cast glass.

But a lot of our time was taken just staring at the hundreds of sparkly jewellery pieces – the smallest pieces, but the only ones which were just about in our price range. And sure enough, two of our group could not resist buying a ring and a brooch, which we took to the Horseshoe pub across the road afterwards to marvel at and admire.

Andrew Logan’s Glasshouse will be opening to private groups of 4-6 people until January – I urge you to get in touch with them if you want to experience this spectacle before it is gone forever.

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Wintery West Dean

This has been a busy last few weeks. Packing large trade orders has given way to the packaging up of loads of little parcels for my retail sales. I’ve got three huge boxes of stock for taking around local events in the run up to Christmas, and of course I’ve been preparing new work for our big Christmas show coming up, Designed | Crafted.

And somewhere in there I’ve had to squeeze four days of teaching down at West Dean, which is where I am currently, typing up blogposts at 6am in an empty computer suite!

In all the craziness I was fully expecting to have forgotten something from the long list of materials and tools that I bring each time I come down to West Dean. By the evening of Day 1, I realised with consternation that my students had worked their way through my entire stock of clear glass in a single day! And we had three days of the course left. There was nothing for it but an overnight trip back to London to pick up more glass – frustrating but unavoidable as sending large pieces of glass by post was not going to work.

So I set out that night, leaving the Christmassy cosiness of the college with its roaring fire and its twinkling tree and venturing out into the chilly night. I stayed the night in London and set my alarm for 5.30am to make sure I had enough time to make it back in time to meet my students for breakfast back at West Dean.

Where the night before had been chilly, the morning was freezing and I left in darkness, with the tyre tracks glistening in the headlights on the icy roads. I wrapped myself in a blanket and I must have looked pretty dishevelled as I stopped for petrol, still in darkness, on the A3.

Sunrise Landscape

And yet just as I drove into West Sussex the inky skies started lightening. The colours were seeping in with the dawn and the painted sky started warming as I drove my familiar route through the villages of the South Downs. I climbed a road winding through a wooded hill and as I crested the hill, the sky seemed almost in an instant to spill open into the full fiery sunrise. I practically did a handbrake turn into a small country lane to grab my camera and capture the moment!

A herd of gormless looking rams came to investigate as I stood at the side of the field, wrapped in my blanket, snapping away at the sky. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen such a spectacular sunrise, and even the local radio got in on the act, broadcasting that they would put up their listeners’ photos of the sunrise on their website. As I drove on the last part of my journey, it was absolutely joyful to see it transform itself above my head from a rich layered spectrum of colour through the trees to a colour field of puffy cloud trails in soft pink and yellow and finally, by the time I arrived at college it had cooled into a silvery sky with a low winter sun.

West Dean looked like the archetypal country house in winter scene, with a picture-perfect dusting of frost across the fields. I had arrived early for breakfast so I spent twenty minutes crunching through the fields to take more photographs. In moments like that the house at West Dean feels magical and a repository of tradition, history and memory.

Designed | Crafted Christmas

We’re really delighted to announce a new Designed | Crafted show at the Society of Designer Craftsmen Gallery in December.

Designed Crafted E-invite

After the success of our show during London Design Week in September, we thought we must do another show for Christmas. Being in the festive season, the emphasis of this show would naturally be a little different. Whereas we curated our last show to include a range of large gallery pieces with a sharp design edge, the new Designed | Crafted incarnation will be more of a pop up shop with a myriad of handmade gifts.

My fellow curator, Brett Manley, and I absolutely loved the process of finding new makers for the new show. We wanted more artists this time to offer a wider range of products and I think we’ve achieved a really good balance of materials with some absolutely gorgeous pieces which fulfill our manifesto of curating objects which lie at the boundary of craft and design.

We have also brought together a pretty dynamic group of artists. We’ve discovered some exciting new makers whose graduation work has attracted a buzz and mixed them in with some well established artists with a loyal following. For the full list of artists, check out our new Designed | Crafted website.

The pop up show will launch on the 15th of December and it will stay open right until Christmas Eve for any last minute East London shoppers. We will have two late Christmas shopping evenings until 9pm, and we would cordially invite you to join us at the Private View between 7 and 9pm on 16th December.

Do get in contact if you would like to come along, we’d love to see you there.

Society of Designer Craftsmen Gallery, 24 Rivington Street, London EC2A 3DU
15-24 December, Mon-Sun 11am-7pm

Love West Dulwich

I tend to avoid fairs and markets. Not as a punter, of course, I love going to them, I just don’t do them. Maybe because I’m too pampered in my nice warm studio, or too snobby about selling anywhere except a sleek gallery or gorgeous giftshop. But I was in a local shop last week where I saw a flyer for a West Dulwich Christmas Fair and on a whim I contacted the organiser. I got lucky; a stallholder had just dropped out, so the stall was mine.

LoveWestDulwich

I dragged along my son Isaac to help out, on the promise of bringing comfy chairs and buying him a lamb curry for lunch from Indigo, our favourite local Indian restaurant. And we ended up having a fantastic day!

Being the latest latecomer we were given the end stall but it ended up being a blessing in disguise. I’m a seasoned exhibitor at trade shows in places like Earls Court and Olympia where the journey between the car and the stand is usually logistically challenging and inevitably interminable. So somehow it felt wrong to have parked right next to our West Dulwich stall and unpacked the car within five minutes flat!

But the best part was that we sold glass like hotcakes, so when I sold out of a couple of lines and our money box was bursting with cash, I could even nip back to the studio to restock. It was a cold day but the winter sun held all day and we had wrapped up warm. And it was a pleasure to sell to local people, some of whom I recognised as Open House customers.

Fair in evening

As the light began to fade in the late afternoon, we talked about coming back for the next fair in May. It felt like a really satisfying day so we’ll definitely be back!

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Sad face

An update on my shortlisted proposal for the art commission at Abingdon School… well, my proposal was submitted, my designs developed and numerous conversations with various studios helped me to flesh out my ideas. I spent four hours last Friday driving to my interview, including a very tense hour spent in standstill traffic outside Oxford wondering how late it was going to make me! And after my interview, I felt fairly confident that I’d got my ideas across to the panel of six representatives from the school.

However I had my hesitations and I didn’t want to go full steam ahead without raising the prospect of the challenge that I faced in getting the budget to work. In the end, I think this may have raised doubts as the commission was being managed on a tight schedule, and I was told this week that I didn’t make it through to the next stage.

Design for Abingdon School

It’s a real shame, as I think the glass would have looked spectacular. Ironically it wasn’t the glass that was causing such an issue with the budget, but the supporting structure. A pair of stainless steel beams to hold the glass panel would have taken 40% of the budget, and this was the simplest solution. I was looking into alternative methods of supporting the 600 kg of glass in the 10 metre high glass wall that I was proposing, despite the fact that the roof was not to be load bearing, and I may well have come up with an innovative solution that could have cost less but, alas, time was running out. However the design of the glass itself presented no such challenges and I had an immediate image in my head as soon as I read the brief. The artwork was to be installed in the new Science Centre, within the main staircase, and it was intended to represent the three sciences that were located on each floor. My concept was based around the way that I feel boys learn (Abingdon is a boys’ school) and, with a sixteen year old son who’s just finished his GCSEs, this is a pretty pertinent subject matter for me.

Boys’ learning seems to me to me much less consistent than that of girls. Boys seem to spend a lot of time absorbing much teaching without apparently learning much! Then somehow a teacher or parent says something in the right way and that acts as a key that opens a door of learning and suddenly they make great strides forward. So my artwork is a trail of iconography representing the curriculum across the seven years for each of the three sciences. But every so often one of these images is picked out in golden hues to symbolise the metaphorical door to learning being opened. The history of Abingdon School has a strong association with the number 63, and my artwork represented this numerically with an image symbolising each of the three terms of the year, for each of the seven years a boy will be at the school and for each of the three sciences which adds up to 63 images in the artwork.

Glass Proposal for Abingdon School

It’s really a pity that they didn’t go for it, but I’ll be following future developments on the commission with interest.