Ed Rucha

Checked the Ed Rucha show at Wolves Art Gallery the other week. Really loved this piece, it makes me feel sad. I really want to start making typography that is more expressive like this, in the way that it emphasizes and adds further meaning to the words, not just pretty letters.

Them Wolves

Spent the back end of last week making wolf masks from good old paper mache, I think I might do more of that sort of thing, it's good fun. Anyway, the masks were to take photos of my friends' band with on sunday. Here are a few of the results...I'm using gradients far too much for things in photoshop of late.

Home of Metal

Went to the Home of Metal show at BMAG to try and find some inspiration for the Black Country based page spread project. It was the first thing I used my student discount for (why is this exciting to me?). The history side of things was quite interesting, I've always found genre origins and all of that fascinating, but I think I found the rest of the show a bit flat...seemed very heavy on merchandise and the nerdier side of music "fans" than about the music itself and the experience it might give. Lots of objects in glass boxes, I can't really get excited about seeing anyone's guitar in a glass box. That said, I don't know how I'd have gone about curating what is intrinsically a visual exhibition about something that is audible. Should probably just go to an actual real life gig.

I will probably come back to some of the zines that were on show at some point, nice lettering.

 I just remembered the Skins episode with the metal kid and Napalm Death. Something about that episode caught beautifully about what it means to have music to belong to when you're young and a bit of an outsider. This is possibly something I found missing from the exhibition...but perhaps this is just personal. Skins does show flashes of genius sometimes. Sometimes.


When I was at primary school, when the "great" Oasis vs Blur tabloid battle kicked off.. Me and a boy in my class picked our sides, I'm ashamed to say that in hindsight I definitely chose the worse side, but in my defense, I was only about 9. We took the battle very seriously, graffiti-ing each others work, post-its, magazine snip-its etc. None of the other girls in my class had any time for either band, they were "scary drug addicts", I felt special. Obviously most of this was just very primitive flirting, but that "sides" mentality in music is really powerful when you're young...however ridiculous it seems now.

So I'm still not really sure what to do for this project, but I'm still glad I went.

More Liverpool

I felt you and I knew you loved me.

Liverpool Tate

Shots from Liverpool Tate, quite a bit of typographic work which interested me (as always)..I enjoy trying to capture something different about the work which reflects its current surroundings when photographing...I think this is partly what can be so interesting about sculpture...a similar ethos to John Cage's 4'33". The views from the galleries murky windows felt very remote.

Crosby Beach

Photos from Crosby beach trip and Anthony Gormley's Another Place. I feel like I've become much more receptive to being outdoors of late...sounds a bit silly...I've lived in the city for 7 years now and I think the initial knee-jerk reaction to embed myself here and never return to the country has finally worn off. I'm happy doing both, and sea air is lovely.

I really want to get to see the Angel of the North in the next year, I actually want to see a lot more of Britain full-stop. For a long time I think I've neglected my own country as somewhere to explore, naively written it off as identikit town centres full of chain shops, but fortunately there's still a lot more still to be found than that.

Last night I watched Andrew Kotting's Gallivant - travels with his 85 year old grandmother and mentally-handicapped 7 year old daughter around the entire British coastline, which helped confirm my revelations. Much of it is shot on Super8...something I've always loved and really want to have a play with. I don't think all of the film worked, but there's some lovely cinematography and the scenes with the grandmother and daughter were quite magical - the way shots were often sped up seemed to emphasise the jittery movements of the daughter, Eden, and made them somehow beautiful. The other highlight was brief coverage of Jaywick Sands, a place I've been facinated with for several years, and photographed last summer - my photos here.

I also want to learn sign language.

Some Letters

Visit to Crosby Beach, I made an alphabet from razor shells....no idea why I only did a little h.

Metronomy

Poster for Metronomy gig created over the summer, very heavily insprired/taken from Andrzej Bertrandt's polish Solaris poster. The swirl design started life as a sheet of paper on my record turntable, and coloured icing in a piping bag, as shown below.

The idea of using a turntable to create things might have been planted in my head from Sculpture's turntable zoetrope performance at Flatpack festival earlier this year.

The Complaints Department from Sculpture on Vimeo.