Back from a trip to London centred around
seeing The Book of Mormon - uuuuuuummmh I felt that I was part of the very meta
experience - meanwhile I checked out a few shows - Losing the Compass curated
by Scott Cameron Weaver and Mathieu Paris at White Cube was beautifully put
together - nothing new but it had some really good examples and its always
interesting to find oneself wandering through the area around Bond Street at
this time of the year, an artwork in itself. Jon Rafman at the Zabludowicz
collection is truly the most extraordinary exhibition I have seen in a while
- I haven't felt so wonderfully assaulted in a long time
http://www.zabludowiczcollection.com/visit/london. The Kibbo Kift show at the
Whitechapel will inform the collection of capes I am in the middle of making
with their quite odd clothing/costume/uniform. If you're a fan of data, both
its exploitation by artists and explanation by designers and scientists you
might not learn anything new from Big Bang Data at Somerset house but it is a
show full of information! The initial work by Ryoji Ikeda was a smaller but
perfectly formed version of the installation I saw at Brewer st Car park - it's
disturbingly wondrous. Elsewhere in the cavernous labyrinthine space there is
also the beautifully contemplative One And All - an exhibition about the coast
and the sea. The Calder at Tate Modern is quite beautiful and just about
elevates him from maker of jaunty mobiles (just). At Tate Britain the haunting
work by Susan Philipsz: War Damaged Musical Instruments is truly moving and Auerbach
- well he did use an awful lot of paint painting the same subjects over and
over and over again - but I guess that's the point. I also popped into the
National to spend an hour with a few of my favourite paintings - Swabian's
portrait of a woman of the Hofer Family being one - the
glorious detail of the cloth gives a flavour of what and how people wore
clothes, right down to the threads used to gather the cloth in a headdress or
the knot in a ribbon. London - the most exciting city in the world?
just finishing off the last presentations of
the year (but not the first term as we are working within a new (another)
structure) for the BA Textiles course at NUA - its all about professional
practice and they are delivered through workshops (so you had to be there) but you
get a flavour of what goes on there. It's an important element of becoming
professional, I wish somebody had of considered it professional or just
appropriate to of taught me it at College, although most of it has been created
in the years since.
