collaborationandthebook

a good day at wysing working with a range of creative people focusing on the idea of the book as a structure - highlight has to be the discussion around the idea of the romantic internet v the pragmatic book!

bookinroyalacademymagazine

one of my books is featured in an article in the royal academy magazine on book art. I was invited to submit a piece for the summer show by Stephen Chambers who has written an insightful comment on the bookwork – translate every answer into a question – alongside an overview by Stephen Bury - to find out about the show go to www.royalacademy.org.uk/summerexhibition

planning2makebooks

i have been invited to participate in the upcoming artists' retreat at Wysing Arts Centre by Antonia Blocker (https://owa.nuca.ac.uk/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.wysingartscentre.org/) in Cambridgeshire. The retreat is organised for the Curating Contemporary Art course at the RCA. The retreat, programmed by Kit Hammonds, will be focused around the theme of 'In Flux' and will take place over the course of four days, from May 24th to May 27th. The CCA students' involvement stems from their upcoming exhibition at the Showroom, which will present the work of Mexican artist, writer and publisher Ulises Carrion (1941 - 1989), whose work was influenced by the Fluxus movement.
I am working on a ‘whole book philosophy’ workshop derived from the seminal text written by Ulises Carrion – The New Art of Making Books. http://www.centerforbookarts.org/art/carrion.html a text that informed my thinking around book making.

thelastcoupleofdays

spent the last couple of days reworking the Moulsham street project – so far it has gone through 6 stages of development – i think that i may have got to the initial design stage which would leave final design stage to go. the weekend was the latest incarnation of faster than sound at Snape Maltings – as i looked around i realised that i may be one of the few people to of attended all the events – i think Mira Calix http://www.myspace.com/you_could_feel_the_sky may be another one! – the highlight of this one was Juneau projects installation – a bunch of guys who make their own ‘sound machines’ basically bits of game joy sticks and key boards that play samples – they were joined by 2 members of the London Contemporary Orchestra, who were the centre of the evening, for the last number

inthestudio

spent a couple of hours in the photographic studio documenting the latest work professionally – interesting to work digitally with the camera linked up to the mac and working with the software – at the moment i have a memory stick of raw data and need to develop tiffs from these and then to upload them onto the blog.

4showstobuild

its that time of year – beginning to put together the end of year shows – this year I am working on 4 exhibitions – the MA Book Art at Camberwell, the BA Textiles, MA Textile Culture and MA Drawing at NUCA.

workingwithpeople

an interesting couple of days - two successful examples of working with people – I decided to run a post graduate cross course session at NUCA as a workshop rather than a presentation. I set up a situation where we could explore the generation of sequential image and story making, looking at collaboration, audience and levels of communication along the way – all with a coat hanger some thread and an open mind.

I spent the Saturday at Moulsham School past pupils reunion running a display of the art proposals for Moulsham street as a result of the conversations and feedback some of the work is being altered and refined to deliver a more focused proposal.
I have added a layered, richer reading to the proposed words with the proposed addition of two concepts. These are in addition to the overall concept of reading the street through time.
The concept of duality came out of a conversation with a past resident of Moulsham Street and was explored over the afternoon. The idea came from thinking about the proximity of the amusement arcade with its juke box to the Salvation Army Citadel with its War Cry and the battle for the souls of the youth. So I am looking at putting together possible pairs and developing a dialogue between them within the street.

teachingandexcited

i was invited to put some work in the summer show at the royal academy by the selector this year – stephen chambers. i have not heard yet if i am in but the magazine asked for some images of the work i submitted – so we shall see.

it’s been a really good time for my teaching for NUCA at the moment. a full day of tutorials on the Drawing MA led to many interesting threads of discussion – ranging from the idea of chance and ways of generating content to graphic scores and talking about a really wide range of artists from Robert Ryman to Stelarc via Tomas Saraceno and Mark Wallinger. We even threw in Edward de Bono. a meeting with textile culture to discuss the hang of the final show in the lunch hour to set up a work centred group seminar in two weeks time and some work with a student to assess the use of PowerPoint in her practice. monday saw me working on the Design Course presenting a brief with andy campbell which focused on information graphics - my session saw me talking about systems and communication http://www.slideshare.net/l.bicknell/presentation-to-design-year-zero lunch was taken up with my line manager nick rodgers organizing the final textiles show at the university and the logistics of new designers at the same time – I was specifically looking at the design of the space and fitting in the assessment of the work. today sees me at home working out a drawing workshop for the surface design students – i will focus on how to develop options and consider context and then there is the seminar i am running for the MA core course on thursday – its turning into a workshop looking at the generation of image and text, developing sequence, narrative and translation. this way of working is exciting – using the range of skills and approaches i have developed through experience, interest and collaboration over the past 20 years – maybe this is how art colleges/universities could use their employees.