Glass, Music and More

A shortish post, despite a busy week with the (almost) full compliment of staff back at the School of Jewellery and preparing for the new intake of students. I can't quite believe that it is a whole year since I started there. What a whirlwind!

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I have written before of my friend, Carrie Fertig (here and here) and it was with some delight that I noticed that she was performing one of her glass-making-music works here in Birmingham on Friday night, hosted by the MAC by Craftspace. Accompanied by percussionists and live electronics, she makes and plays instruments made entirely from glass and part of the performance includes the live making of some of the instruments.

We were requested not to take photographs during the performance, so here is a video by Carrie of the sort of thing we experienced:



My favourite moment was undoubtedly the violent clash of an incredible glass-icicle chandelier hung from the middle of the space:

Which is then allowed to drift slowly to rest and silence, reminding me of nothing less than Ligeti's "Poem Symphonique":


The gradual fading of the sound allows the ear to pick out patterns which subtly change, slipping in and out of focus until all that is left is silence. From the chaotic, almost terrifying action of the clashing glass rods - the fear of them shattering, the idea of them falling on the audience - the performance space becomes a contemplative space, full of mesmerised people. From a personal point of view, I didn't really want it to stop.

The rest of the performance mixed serious musical intent with humour, small pieces of theatre, such as the rolling of these beautiful glass rattles:

As well as pathos and fear, such as the piece performed on a piece of glass chain:

Far from the sounds one might think that these instruments would make, the range of sounds is incredible, enhanced by live electronics.

Left to right, the "Torcher Chamber Arkestra" are, Stu Brown (percussion), Carrie Fertig (glass blowing and percussion) and Alistair MacDonald (percussion and electronics).

Afterwards, before we all headed off for curry, the audience were invited to try the instruments for themselves, which was brilliant.

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Saturday was my usual jaunt to the Digbeth fruit and vegetable market followed by a visit to the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery "Waterhall" for the exhibition of work by the MA Jewellery, Silversmithing and Related Products course at the School of Jewellery. It is pretty impressive that the show is being held in the main public gallery space in the city and I hope that this continues.

There were loads of graduates exhibiting and there is not space to go into it all but there is a Facebook page for the group here. What follows is a small personal selection of my own favourites:

Enamel works by Du Juan.

Enamel works by Du Juan.

Ring by Yen-Chen Wang.

Bowls by Charlotte Smith.

Bowls by Charlotte Smith.

Work made from paint by Xenia Walschikow.

Work made from paint by Xenia Walschikow.

Work in porcelain by Karen Lester.

Work in porcelain by Karen Lester.

The show is on for the next two weeks and is well worth a visit.

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I've been back in the workshop again, making more works for "Made in the Middle", including a large selection of gem-set nut rings, still to be polished:

Set (l-r) with yellow sapphire, pale pinkish zircon, garnet, garnet and cornflower blue sapphire.

Apart from that, I've been working on the garden, planting my winter salads!
More soon.

Music For Hedges

Today I made a visit to deepest Wales on a spur-of-the-moment response to a Tweet by one of my favourite artists, Brian Eno.

Brian Eno has used the bells of a church for his latest composition #AndrewLogan #Berriew https://t.co/KheDYa33QJ pic.twitter.com/djhlyNVyT3

— Brian Eno (@dark_shark) August 24, 2016

What could this be about?
Well, it turned out that Eno has composed a piece to celebrate 25 years of Andrew Logan's Museum of Sculpture being housed in the tiny Welsh village of Berriew and that it would be premiered there today.

The piece was intended to be performed from hidden speakers around the village whilst the bells in the church were played but an absence of bell-ringers meant that we just heard the music without the live bell accompaniment, which was rather disappointing, even though the short piece - derived from the sounds of the bells themselves - is rather lovely.

Andrew Logan has been a peripheral constant in my life since I first became aware of him in London in the early 1980s with his "Alternative Miss World". Whilst he is definitely a sculptor, I tend to think of him primarily as a jeweller - rather as I do with Alexander Calder - and his large-scale works are as much about 'bejewelling' as any of his actual jewellery and he makes work which is devoid of pretention: it is full of joie-de-vivre, kitchy, campy and, most importantly, full of fun. It is all the stranger then that I discovered this museum by that chance tweet: it has been open for 25 years and neither myself nor Sally Collins - a fellow fan of his work - had heard of it.

The place itself is quite magical, tucked away in rural Wales and housed in converted squash-courts (I'd love to know what idiot thought that a tiny village with a population of around 1300 needed high-tech squash courts!) and literally crammed with Andrew's work: you have to literally squeeze between the exhibits, passing this enormous egg at the entrance:

In view of my own "Walk Like A Man (Sex Crime)" of a few weeks back, I was delighted to see this little shrine to Divine:

And to learn that Andrew Logan and Divine were good friends.

At the back of the museum was the "School of Noise" who were using some very lo-tech equipment to make some great sounds with anyone who showed an interest...

The man himself was very much present, along with kilometres of mylar:

And he signed my copy of his book:

The School of Jewellery has been invited to come and visit, which is brilliant and I was reminded of one of his works which is local to me, the "Pegasus" on a traffic roundabout in darkest Dudley!

A fascinating, charming and modest man.

I'll leave this section with a short video about the Alternative Miss World Competition:

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I've spent most of the week in the workshop, working on my pieces for "Made in the Middle" and have managed to get quite a lot together. I'm really pleased with how these are shaping up and I've been deliberately letting the materials speak for themselves, free from imposed narratives.

Interestingly, this move away from the idea of an imposed ('illustrative') narrative had been formalised in an essay I've been asked to write for a book on Narrative Jewellery which my friend Mark Fenn is writing. More on that later.

In some ways, these pieces are a development of the aesthetic and philosophy shaping the ultra-minimal nut rings which I make:

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The garden has been busy, as might be expected and harvest time is upon me. Having only started in late February - when I bought the house - there is not so much of a harvest this year, but I'm pleased to have been cropping these wonderful 'Orca beans', which really do look like miniature whales!

More next week!

Holiday Over

Back to work today and straight into preparations for the coming year, both academically - for the new and continuing students - and in terms of my own work.

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The holiday was relaxing and fairly uneventful. On the back of my political fury of the last few months, I had been planning to go to Brighton's "Pride" event, something I've shunned since the early 1990s when the event ceased to be political and became no more than a corporate, money-spinning festival of hedonism and as the years have gone by, any whiff of politics has been squeezed out, leaving a crass event which has previously accepted sponsorship from companies encouraging prostitution. Anyway, I thought that this year, I would go along to show some sort of solidarity with those who have fled persecution in their countries, as a kind of mark of solidarity with those who died, were injured or traumatised in Orlando, as a middle-finger gesture to the rising right both here in the UK and in the world generally.

In the end, I didn't go. The website is resolutely politics-free. It is sponsored by a corporate finance company, several drinks manufacturers, a manufacturer of underwear... The whole thing is one enormous fiasco, designed to extract the maximum cash from a minority who have had their life(style) commodified and rendered a lucrative income stream by a clever sleight of social engineering.

While I don't hold with the Anarcho-syndicalist politics of the originators, I was delighted to see this poster a few days later:

I was not so happy to see that someone had attempted to rip it down, that it had already been ripped down in other parts of town, almost as if people want to airbrush this away from history, as if it is in some way raining on their sybaritic parade.

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The holiday was very quiet with, as usual, a lot of time spent in churches. This year's crop included the amazing modernist masterpiece, Coventry Cathedral - which is more like an art-gallery than a church, featuring the very best work by all the main players in late 1950s British art and design - and by far the best thing Basil Spence ever did.

The cathedral continues this role as gallery and I was pleased to see that one of my favourite  bands, Mogwai, will be playing there very soon.

I had gone to Coventry to see for myself, the work of one of my heroes of modernism, William Mitchell (of whom I have written perviously, here). His murals for the "Three Tuns" pub in the city centre, which is now a fried-chicken restaurant, are incredible:

I'm pleased to report that these are now listed. Coventry is full to bursting of modernism, from the earliest, 1950s styles to the above late-bloom of brutalism.

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Ely Cathedral - and Ely itself - present a very different face to the modernist, dynamic, multicultural Coventry. I've wanted to visit Ely Cathedral for years to see the painted ceiling and remarkable octagonal lantern, dating from the 1300s:

The cathedral itself is a fantastic mashup of Norman, Ornamented Gothic and Victorian architecture and the detailing of the Lady Chapel is marvellously bizarre:

There is also a fine painted ceiling in the main nave:

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The other remarkable church we visited was Saint Peter ad Vincula in South Newington which is pleasant enough from the outside:

Inside, however, is a very different story... Featuring several wonderful Mediaeval wall-paintings, including a "Doom" over the nave:

Well worth a visit.

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We also got to East Kent for one of my regular visits to Dungeness and Folkestone, albeit on different days. Dungeness was misty and cold - not my first choice for a visit, but the fog made the place really atmospheric:

Folkestone, on the other hand, was brilliantly sunny and hot and I made one of my usual trips to Cursley & Bond Gallery to see Nicola and Chris. This time, they were exhibiting work by Jimmy Cauty...

A photo posted by Cursley & Bond (@cursleyandbond) on Aug 11, 2016 at 8:18am PDT

Folkestone is changing all the time. Nothing is static and it is nearly a year since I was last there. Now the old harbour arm has opened up as a place to visit with bars and cafes. I was also there to collect an artwork from Russ, aka. The Dirty Pen.

This owl is to commemorate my move to Birmingham - when I moved here, the place was covered in giant owls, decorated by various local artists and organisations. I'm planning to have it tattooed onto my leg very soon.

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Back in Birmingham again and it is on with my work for the Made in the Middle exhibition and preparing for the completion of my collaboration with Jeff Zimmer for the ACJ anniversary show, 20:20 Visions next year.

This is the computer model for the piece, "1694: An Eye For Optical Theory", of which I wrote last year in this post.  Today I received an exciting parcel from Jeff with his part of the contribution to it:

The recycled spectacle-glass lenses, polished and with a painted and enamelled plate behind.

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More soon!