V&A Power of Making exhibition

The Power of Making exhibition at the V&A showed me what we can achieve if we just put our minds to it and apply a little bit of patience. Pieces such as the gorilla made of coat hangers was a perfect example of this. The sculpture is simple in structure, the most astonishing thing is the amount of concentration and commitment that it must have taken to produce it.

The following piece is a japanese-style "wheelchair" designed with Stephen Hawkin in mind.

 I had never really seen the produce of a 3D printer before so this urn really impressed me:

 

Crochetdermy bear, Shauna Richardson:

 Fantastic glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly:

British Museum

This week I visited the British Museum in London. I was quite surprised that hardly any of the artifacts were British but nevermind!

I couldn't resist taking a picture of the magnificent roof:

And comparing it to that of Westfield shopping centre:

I really like the swirls and patterns in this vase:

This fella is just awesome:

This just doesn't look 1000s of years old, incredible:

Pollock's Toy Museum London

I visited the Pollock's Toy Museum in London recently and managed to capture a few interesting patterns and pieces of artwork amongst the old toys.

 

 The above work reminded me of some of Dali's work I had seen in Paris:

The following are discs from a "Zeotrope".

A zoetrope is a device that produces an illusion of action from a rapid succession of static pictures. The term zoetrope is from the Greek

Greek language

Greek , an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, is the language of the Greeks. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records...

 words ζωή - zoe, "life" and τρόπος - tropos, "turn". It may be taken to mean "wheel of life".

"The New Game of the Goose":

 

"The Aviary: The Bird Fancyers Recreation" wallpaper:

Pretty door patterns:

Oriental folk toy:

Ashmolian Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford

I visited the Ashmolean museum yesterday, it holds many antiques, coins, works of art, sculptures, textiles...

Above is a picture of some mini porcelain portraits along with a list of the subjects' names.

Leeds City Art Gallery: Sculpture and Tapestry Exhibitions

Emess is a Berlin-based graffiti artist who does work similar to that of Banksy. Stencil graffiti is a new style in the genre and can be seen more and more frequently as it is getting pretty fashionable.

"Sprayer" by Emess.

"Inlaid Patchwork Berlin" by textile artist, Ursel Arndt, 2008/09 is a patchwork of stencil graffiti art.

At first this sculpture did not seem very interesting, however when I read the little plaque it actually proved to be quite intriguing. Left to right: "Momento", "American Garamond", "Antique Olive" and "Orator", 2005, are scale enlargements of full-stops in the four fonts. They each have the same point size but the large scale shows the intricate details which exist within the apparently universal and uniform symbols.


"Artist's Formula for Success Chart: Aquarius" by Laurence Burt, 1970. I found it strange that someone would want to attempt to create a mathematical formula or flowchart to how to find success as an artist. This piece of art, or science(?), almost shows how "unlogical" art is but is juxtaposed with how it is itself a "successful work of art".

An extract of "Family Tree 1970-1981" by David Nash, 1985. This drawn work was appealing to me as it had been carefully hand drawn and showed lots of possibilities that a tree holds.


"A Work Between Two Insitutions" by Stephen Willats, 1987. This shows the relationship between a block of flat and a City Art Museum in a strange, electric-circuit-style diagram.

"Sign Elements III" by Matt Rugg, 1963. I'm not really sure what to think of this piece but I quite liked it...

"Untitled" Computer generated and screen printed by Darrel Viner, 2001. Darrel Viner produced a whole series of these 2D spheres for which he had written a computer program to create them. There is a debate as to whether computer generated works count as art, I personally feel that the computer is merely a medium, like a paint brush or pencil and that it is still the work of an artist.

"Extended Cube" by David Nash, 1996. The same artist who produced "Family Tree" has extended a wooden cube...for some reason...

"Acrobats" by Ian Hamilton Finlay, 1966. This is one of Finlay's "Concrete poems". The title is the main part of the work with the letters jumping and tumbling in mid-air.

"Faithful Servants (Marine)" by Edward Wadsworth, 1928. This piece was in the main art gallery rather than the sculpture exhibition. I particularly like surrealist art as to me it has more thought put into it as there is a meaning behind each object and its positioning.

The plaque reads: "Wadsworth served in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a gunner. After the war he made drawings of the Black Country and northern slag heaps that highlighted humanity's devastating impact on the landscape. They echoed Nash's scarred battlefields. In the late 1920s Wadsworth made a series of still lifes of nautical objects in marine settings. Often the objects were no longer in common use. The idyllic, other-worldy nature of these still lifes suggests a yearning for a pre-war era of peace and calm."