Laura Letinksy at the Photographers’ Gallery recently. Extraordinarily beautiful and disconcerting images, reminiscent of paintings from another time and completely contemporary.
Architects O’Donnell+Tuomey
Coffee Lina Stores
In an unexceptional long low brick and corrugated tin building on an industrial estate in Sudbury, Suffolk, Gainsborough Silks. Weaving silk, linen, and wool to custom short-run designs for the Queen, Paul Smith, anyone, on both the latest digital machines and extraordinarily beautiful and complex 100 year-old looms. Two of my favourite subjects, craft and collaboration, with the added thrill of a priceless textile archive and an active apprenticeship programme. Here is a business succeeding in an age of global mega-production through skill and intelligence.
Derek Wilson ceramics are on show at Contemporary Applied Arts from 15 November; meanwhile photographs of his work, both useful and art object, and his Belfast studio on an equally beautifully put together website.
Design Junction at the Old Sorting Office, on til Sunday, worth seeing for the building alone.
Lower Marsh behind Waterloo Station is a curious street, undisturbed by twenty-first century development despite its prime location. Fish and chips, second-hand books, massage parlour, tatooing, vintage, primary school, micro-supermarket - something for everyone and now a shopfront for product designer Michael Anastassiades. He seems to be working with the traditions of another era, using fine materials and tapping into a level of craftsmanship that we might have thought no longer existed, nevertheless producing entirely contemporary objects.
New products by Torsten Neeland on show this week in Redchurch Street. Typically spare, beautiful and useful, the exhibition has been designed to be entirely recycled.
Kokon stainless steel and acrylic thermos flask
Bald pressed cork and rubber tray for M-Products, exclusively avaialble through Magazin
mca chair development on-going, this version in plain ply with a Bute Tweed slip and leather pillow. More about the project here.
More on the theme of collaborations and retail re-inventing itself. At Century they already combine twentieth century classic furniture with hair cutting, unusual but why not, and for London Design Festival they are collaborating with Colourhouse – vintage inspired maybe, by way of Memphis (Sottsass not Tennessee), modern printed textiles by the metre, on the chair or in the shape of lamp shades well matched with Ercol and Robin Day.
Show on now until the end of September.
58 Blandford Street W1
Last Olympic post, two more images from the park which was due to close for 18 months after the games, however there now seems to be a plan to keep it accessible for a while at least.
Olympic Park electricity sub-station by Nord, Scottish architects, working with industrial and material heritage to produce this useful building in knitted black brick; quietly spectacular, the UK’s largest ever wildflower meadows at the park by Professors Nigel Dunnett and James Hitchmough at the University of Sheffield who are on a mission to show us the relevance of another, natural, heritage and its environmnetal importance.
David Cameron and Boris Johnson say we are open for business, architects are asking how this squares with the blanket ban on publicity for architects, engineers and designers who are inextricably a part of London 2012 and its success. Everyone understands that McDonalds don’t want Burger King muscling in on the act, but what purpose does this bit of IOC overlordship serve?
The Aquatic Centre designed by Zaha Hadid, photograhed by Luke Hayes; chair of New London Architecture Peter Murray wears the t-shirt.
Mill building fabric, textile design and mca frame ar Ridley Road. More about the chair and the exhibition here.
Unexpected and subtle groups of glaze colour and shape by Louisa Taylor, who derives her palette from historic reference. Ceramics Resident at the V&A until June 2012
Working on something to do with a single form, print, repetition and limited colour, and looking around for clues from, amongst others, master pattern-maker Lucienne Day, Australian fabric house Cloth and William Scott’s abstractions.
Connect by Cloth
“My mum never bought chocolates at Easter, she always bought board games instead.
Connect Four was one of my favourites.”
William Scott Still Life Brown with Black Note, 1969, Oil on canvas, Irish Museum of Modern Art.
Lapis by Lucienne Day. Designs from her archive now being re-printed digitally by Glasgow School of Art’s Centre for Advanced Textiles in collaboration with Twentytwentyone.
