walkingandlooking

the latest exhibition at the Wellcome Trust is full of excellent objects from Bedlam as well as a number of contemporary interpretations https://wellcomecollection.org/bedlam the Curve at the Barbican has an intriguing show with some great tableaus http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/series.asp?id=1638 Bedwyr Williams has constructed a number of spaces within what is a challenging space. Finally over to Vent in Hoxton which is a small space but has some excellent work from Sid and Jim. Back to Suffolk and a long walk on a beach.

thesmellofthepast

popped over to Coventry to see parents after a day in the lab at Cambridge https://unfoldingthinking.blogspot.co.uk/ - the folding bike is so excellent and allows you get around under your own steam which is especially positive after being at the mercy of 'public transport'. Journeys are cut down, there is a sense of engagement with the city and landscape as you move through it, it's also faster than walking and sometimes faster than a car when getting to work! As a young person growing up in Coventry I watched all the houses I had lived in be demolished, the places I played in be knocked down and levelled for what appeared to be no specific purpose and all the schools I went to turned into either a car park or business park but I hadn't witnessed them be constructed. As I cycled back to the station this afternoon through the centre of town I realised that I can now add a number of buildings to the list of 'buildings-you-watched-be-built-have-a-life-and-are-subsequently-knocked-down-and-then-a-building-is built-on-top-of-it'.

But The Herbert Art Gallery is still there and has the most extraordinary reliefs on the side of the building by Walter Ritchie - Man's Struggle to control the world outside himself and Man's Struggle to control the world inside himself. I can remember when they were originally sited under a walkway inside a structure in the shopping precinct facing each other with a fountain in the middle and so slightly obscured but they are so wonderfully visible in the new location http://www.macearchive.org/Archive/Title/midland-montage-26081959-coventry-sculpture/MediaEntry/36523.html In a spare room in my parents' house I came across some structures from my childhood that take me directly to the present with my work in Cambridge. A series of wooden puzzles made by my Uncle Reg who was both married to my Auntie Floss and a Pattern Maker at the GEC. They are part of one of those memories from the past that somehow post rationally enable you to make sense of the present. In my mind he always appeared to be uniquely other, sitting in his chair at a dark round wooden table, smoking revealing mysterious handmade tactile objects which defied logic. I never could return them to their complete original state after taking them apart. The smell of them was also of another time,  a musky wax polished solid hard wooden time of lace curtains and front rooms that were only used for special occasions.

abookshapedhole

I'm in a book - http://www.ftc-online.org.uk/publications/conference/ the work I was involved in around archives and the fold has been published. It is in Futurescan 3: intersecting identities, the latest publication from the association of fashion and textiles.

an excellent session with the MA Fine Art cohort last night discussing and negotiating the creation of a collaborative, interactive (in a meaningful sense) web presence. when working online the idea of a physical room feels rather Victorian. I have seen the future of education and it is Open College of the Arts - OCA shaped. 

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nanoDTC has taken over my life! - here is a link to the mass of work and thinking - I am supposed to be there a day a week but most weeks it's 2-3. I am learning so much and really enjoying the experience - especially the professional care that I encounter https://unfoldingthinking.blogspot.co.uk/ but other work is still continuing and am managing to find time to see stuff. Went to London specifically to see the physical incarnation of http://www.isthisitisthisit.com/ which was excellent - some great work and the beer didn't run out at the private view. looking forward to working with the Open College of the Arts work - their short project has at its focus the development of a web presence. Still reflecting on Make:Shift and making sense of the experience and in practical terms getting back to the contacts made. here is a link to the presentation I gave http://www.slideshare.net/l.bicknell/makeshift . students at NUA have started on their next project - fashion - my presentation was around extending ideas of the body and our relationship to it http://www.slideshare.net/l.bicknell/briefing-ba3a-project-fashion-67938524 - I have been thinking about why and how we learn - I have been delivering this presentation - http://www.slideshare.net/l.bicknell/to-quit-or-not-to-quit it is an attempt to enable the students to recognise when to change their thinking/behaviour to get results - influenced by Freakonomics. http://freakonomics.com/archive/ Often students have been bludgeoned around the issue of tests and succeeding within this context but have lost sight of their own goals, their intuition and the idea of learning itself and what they actually want to learn.    

got to see the Green Room - a chillingly dark film that left me with a general feeling of oppression - this was a good thing - but brutal. mainly the weekends have been about regenerating the body through long walks by or next to the sea. 

make:shiftshowsusthefuture

back on another train after speaking at Make:Shift in Manchester - delegates were very positive about my talk that had at its core in some ways a traditional yet erratic 'old school' approach to making through gathering - its always interesting to see what will happen when standing in front of images of one's work. The process of talking is always interesting (organising, sifting, sorting images, reflecting and clarifying) and it's rare to get feedback as I'm usually standing at the front in a position of 'sort of power' so the conversations I had after the session were so instructive and helped to place or locate my practice in this new terrain. My panel was full of people talking about fabulous new materials and ways of working - collaboration and hybrid approaching to understanding are the key - obviously. The Manchester Met University were running a collaborative workshop - they were such lovely people and I have some ace paper samples which I intend to explore in the nano project as they have different surfaces on each side so will fully exploit the haptic experience. Meanwhile in the Museum of Science I got the chance to see the textile history of Manchester be performed - the looms are set up and powered - the whole process from raw cotton to calico is show and it was just awesome - if my textile students are reading this you must go - in fact everybody should see it and listen to the people explaining the process's and the wonderful way they weave the social history and trade union activity within the demonstration. I had my bike so managed to get out and about the city - often a mixture of Escher like moments where standing on a steep cobbled street looking up a bridge which carries trains, there is a canal to your side and below that a dual carriage way, all the while surrounded by brick buildings built with civic pride, iron in the road, walls and sky, stone and warehouse regeneration modern sheet glass - I think that I loved it. Manchester Art Gallery had a show looking at Fashion - some good starting points for a discussion around a number of issues as the work was very theatrical, almost beyond catwalk. The highlight of the day outside the conference was the wonderful Rachel Maclean at Home - disturbingly excellent art, awesome space and really friendly, interesting, helpful people. I can't wait to see her work in Venice next year. 

itsallaboutthefuture

at the moment my work/life is all about the residency within NanoDTC at The Maxwell Centre in Cambridge https://unfoldingthinking.blogspot.co.uk/ but I am speaking at Make:Shift in Manchester on Friday so initially I planned and indeed tried to cram 30 years of experience into 10 minutes. This was of course an insane idea so am now, after much reflection, going to talk about how ideas inform process which in turn becomes a methodology for research. I'm going to lean heavily on the past two projects - The Robotics at Kings and Nano in Cambridge as well as bookness!! meanwhile some images from unfolding thinking   

a great day out in London on Tuesday - the discussions with MA Book Art students from Camberwell around the work in the exhibition at the photographers gallery - radical feminism and then in the permanent treasures Gallery at the British Library were superb - as ever the students brought a range of new understandings to the work and some wonderful concepts/questions/thoughts- the role of fundamentalist typography, tyrannical layout, books that have one purpose - the performance of the book, how display informs understanding - subversive labels - labels as the work  - the list goes on. The exhibition of feminist work is worth a visit and contains a range of work that underpins a lot of the performances that I saw as part of Spill at the weekend - a post moment rethink and the upcoming exhibition around maps at the British Museum is sure to be wonderful and a recommendation. In the evening the talk I gave for the Norfolk Contemporary Craft Society went well, I would like to think, with lots of ideas thrown out and a number given back which will be followed up when I get a moment . As I cycled back to the station (to be subjected to another example of poor service from Abellio) the lights and reflection of the St George building at NUA lifted the spirits. a mention for adultswim - http://www.adultswim.com/music/singles-2016/ a beautiful web portal. Meanwhile another day at the Maxwell Centre brought fresh revelations - http://unfoldingthinking.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/chemicallogicofthemicrobialcommunity.html