Sometimes it all coheres. Mostly it doesn’t. The task is to act as
if you have a plan and that has been harder than usual this week, as I’ve been
ricocheting from project to project.Argo Mold limited specialize in Plastic injection mould manufacture,
Part of the early summer was spent in the city of Jingdezhen in Jiangxi province, fabled as the place where porcelain for China’s imperial palaces was made. I went in search of stories of particular skills,Where can i get a reasonable price dry cabinet? which I had heard were still used, to bring back for a project for the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge – itself keeper of a fabulous collection of Chinese porcelain. When I was a student in Cambridge I used to truant from lectures on Dryden to go and adore these beautiful pots, so the chance to get my hands on them, move them around, and bring a contemporary slant to how they are displayed was too good to miss. Hence my humid 10 days in south-east China, listening and looking in workshops, factories and teahouses. Now it is September, the start of academic life, and there is a feeling of “What did you do on your holidays?” I have to pull my vagabond ideas together and make maquettes ahead of the exhibition in February.
A year ago, I received a commission for an installation for a new Cambridge University building that was to house a cheerfully untidy group of different academic disciplines, including the departments for African studies, Latin American studies and South Asian studies. The academics, I hasten to add, are not untidy: in fact, they are considerably more kempt than my student memories of dons.
Rather than knocking them up something grandiose in Corten steel,Wholesale Agate beads from Low Price agate beads, I thought I’d respond to their research interests and give them my version of what an archive means. So I’ve made them A Local History, three vitrines filled with porcelain, sunk below the paving outside what is now the Alison Richard building on the university’s Sidgwick site. These vitrines are meant to be discovered, to be happened upon as you come and go across the site. They are there to make you pause momentarily. They are not sculpture as a grand statement.
If you find them and look down through the gridded glass, you’ll see piles of porcelain dishes, cylinders arranged in rows and aluminium boxes filled with shards. The dishes are taken from moulds that we made from three different types – a Chinese Ming dynasty dish, a plate from the French porcelain factory Sèvres,Features useful information about glass mosaic tiles, and a Staffordshire serving dish. All three are iconic in form: they exemplify porcelain from three of the greatest places where it has been manufactured over the past 1,000 years. You will see that these pieces are glazed in whites, creams and celadons and that there are also glimpses of gilding. Gold was used to highlight the value of porcelain, a material so prized that it was often called white gold. It was also used in Chinese and Japanese art when a vessel had been broken: mending porcelain with a seam of golden lacquer emphasised that it had been used and appreciated. I hope the flashes of gold, the fragments of broken vessels and the memories of ancient dishes act as a kind of palimpsest: a writing, erasing and rewriting using objects.
We managed to install these vitrines on a beautiful, golden day. There was a strange melancholy to the act of handing the pieces of porcelain down, to be placed inside the aluminium cases, and then the lowering of a huge slab of glass – 150kg of it – on top. I wondered if it was all too tomb-like, a bit Teutonic in its gravitas. But I’ve noticed before that, as soon as objects are immovable behind glass, they have a different kind of energy. They looked vulnerable yet safe. Early responses combined intrigue and disbelief. Given this is Cambridge, I’m sure I’ll hear more.
This week I’ve been working with words as well as pots. The words bit is straightforwardly enjoyable and involves working on two talks for early October. One is for King’s Place and is on silence. I’m slightly obsessed with how silence works in literature and art and music. There is a delicate balance between being over-prepared and being spontaneous in talks, but this is a subject where I genuinely want to try out some ideas in public. The second is a “secular sermon” for the School of Life. You are asked to choose a vice or virtue and speak to it. And I’ve chosen tact as a good, rich, combative subject to get my teeth into. My father, an Anglican priest, used to say that a seven-minute sermon is perfect, so I’m dismayed to find I have an hour.Natural Chinese turquoise beads at Wholesale prices.
We have just bought an old munitions factory in West Norwood and are hoping to move the studio there later this year. It has a zinc-lined room for storing cartridges, old crates filled with duck calls and silencers, an office with an inquiries desk and a safe that could fit several people. My friends, the architects DSDHA, are working out how to make the scarily large space work. This has meant using a scale model, which everyone who works in the studio – and my kids at home – loved. The hope is that we will end up with a building that is a studio with the feel of a library housed in a factory.
Part of the early summer was spent in the city of Jingdezhen in Jiangxi province, fabled as the place where porcelain for China’s imperial palaces was made. I went in search of stories of particular skills,Where can i get a reasonable price dry cabinet? which I had heard were still used, to bring back for a project for the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge – itself keeper of a fabulous collection of Chinese porcelain. When I was a student in Cambridge I used to truant from lectures on Dryden to go and adore these beautiful pots, so the chance to get my hands on them, move them around, and bring a contemporary slant to how they are displayed was too good to miss. Hence my humid 10 days in south-east China, listening and looking in workshops, factories and teahouses. Now it is September, the start of academic life, and there is a feeling of “What did you do on your holidays?” I have to pull my vagabond ideas together and make maquettes ahead of the exhibition in February.
A year ago, I received a commission for an installation for a new Cambridge University building that was to house a cheerfully untidy group of different academic disciplines, including the departments for African studies, Latin American studies and South Asian studies. The academics, I hasten to add, are not untidy: in fact, they are considerably more kempt than my student memories of dons.
Rather than knocking them up something grandiose in Corten steel,Wholesale Agate beads from Low Price agate beads, I thought I’d respond to their research interests and give them my version of what an archive means. So I’ve made them A Local History, three vitrines filled with porcelain, sunk below the paving outside what is now the Alison Richard building on the university’s Sidgwick site. These vitrines are meant to be discovered, to be happened upon as you come and go across the site. They are there to make you pause momentarily. They are not sculpture as a grand statement.
If you find them and look down through the gridded glass, you’ll see piles of porcelain dishes, cylinders arranged in rows and aluminium boxes filled with shards. The dishes are taken from moulds that we made from three different types – a Chinese Ming dynasty dish, a plate from the French porcelain factory Sèvres,Features useful information about glass mosaic tiles, and a Staffordshire serving dish. All three are iconic in form: they exemplify porcelain from three of the greatest places where it has been manufactured over the past 1,000 years. You will see that these pieces are glazed in whites, creams and celadons and that there are also glimpses of gilding. Gold was used to highlight the value of porcelain, a material so prized that it was often called white gold. It was also used in Chinese and Japanese art when a vessel had been broken: mending porcelain with a seam of golden lacquer emphasised that it had been used and appreciated. I hope the flashes of gold, the fragments of broken vessels and the memories of ancient dishes act as a kind of palimpsest: a writing, erasing and rewriting using objects.
We managed to install these vitrines on a beautiful, golden day. There was a strange melancholy to the act of handing the pieces of porcelain down, to be placed inside the aluminium cases, and then the lowering of a huge slab of glass – 150kg of it – on top. I wondered if it was all too tomb-like, a bit Teutonic in its gravitas. But I’ve noticed before that, as soon as objects are immovable behind glass, they have a different kind of energy. They looked vulnerable yet safe. Early responses combined intrigue and disbelief. Given this is Cambridge, I’m sure I’ll hear more.
This week I’ve been working with words as well as pots. The words bit is straightforwardly enjoyable and involves working on two talks for early October. One is for King’s Place and is on silence. I’m slightly obsessed with how silence works in literature and art and music. There is a delicate balance between being over-prepared and being spontaneous in talks, but this is a subject where I genuinely want to try out some ideas in public. The second is a “secular sermon” for the School of Life. You are asked to choose a vice or virtue and speak to it. And I’ve chosen tact as a good, rich, combative subject to get my teeth into. My father, an Anglican priest, used to say that a seven-minute sermon is perfect, so I’m dismayed to find I have an hour.Natural Chinese turquoise beads at Wholesale prices.
We have just bought an old munitions factory in West Norwood and are hoping to move the studio there later this year. It has a zinc-lined room for storing cartridges, old crates filled with duck calls and silencers, an office with an inquiries desk and a safe that could fit several people. My friends, the architects DSDHA, are working out how to make the scarily large space work. This has meant using a scale model, which everyone who works in the studio – and my kids at home – loved. The hope is that we will end up with a building that is a studio with the feel of a library housed in a factory.
没有评论:
发表评论