"The switch in pace between each
artist is fascinating - I spent a Sunday afternoon enthralled
by the rough cut of filmmaker Dustin Lynn's footage of Orozco
working, using rainforest seeds as paint."
Lucy Siegle, The Observer, October 2007
Internationally renowned artists and designers have been commissioned to create hand-made prototype habitats for the rapidly declining numbers of bird, bat and bee species in UK urban areas. These bird, bat and bee houses have been created using Phillips de Pury's waste material including cardboard, crates, invitations, catalogues, plastics and wood discarded in the process of packing, moving and installing art works.
Over 45 handmade prototypes will be auctioned on June 27 in London at Phillips de Pury & Company, the proceeds of which will benefit Adventure Ecology's Foundation, Sculpt the Future.
Additionally, the three most appropriate designs for manufacturing will be chosen and distributed through high-end premium retailers and museums. The proceeds of the sales will be donated to protect natural habitats.
The project aims to raise awareness about the endangered habitats of birds, bats and bees in the UK, while reusing corporate waste in a functional and imaginative way. It will also look at ways in which the designs could be produced for a wider market.
Artists and designers involved include:| Tomoko Azumi | Luis Berrios Negron |
| David Austen | Tom Price |
| Jurgen Bey | Raw Edges |
| Martino Gamper | Rolf Sachs |
| David Harrison | Sir Paul Smith |
| Stuart Haygarth | Michael Sodeau |
| Henry Krokatsis | Marcus Tremento |
| Max Lamb | Gavin Turk |
| Peter Marigold | Christopher Williams |
The Art of Ideas encompassed:
1. Two evenings of talks
2. One evening of Art & Music – The Future of Sound Birmingham
Showcase
3. Commissioned Essays
4. An Artists’ Project
5. Cultural Art Map of Birmingham produced by artupdate
The talks, music performances, essays, artists' project, and the cultural art map of Birmingham aimed to shed light the West Midland’s rich and often overlooked cultural quality and diversity.
Speakers at the talks included Robert Yates - Assistant Editor, The Observer, Costa Award winning writer Catherine O’Flynn, James Yarker – Director, Stan’s Café, Stuart Murphy – Creative Director, TwoFour, award-winning musician Soweto Kinch, architect Sam Jacob of FAT – Fashion Architecture Taste, Gavin Wade – artist, curator & founder of Eastside Projects and curator & writer Matt Price.
The 'Future of Sound' Birmingham Showcase was convened by former Human League front man Martyn Ware and curated by Brian Duffy and Lewis Sykes, Director of Cybersonica. It featured Dreams of Tall Buildings, Juneau Projects, Modified Toy Orchestra, The Sancho Plan, and Soweto Kinch.
The commissioned essays were written by Catherine O’Flynn
and Matt Price addressing Birmingham's distinct identity and thriving
artistic life respectively.
The Other Birmingham:
Catherine O’Flynn (PDF)
The Other Birmingham:
Matt Price (PDF)
For the Artists' Project, West Midland Photographers Ravi Deepres, Chris Keenan, and David Rowan were commissioned to take the portraits of West Midland contemporary visual artists/art collectives in their studios. The artists photographed were Jane Anderson, Ayling & Conroy, Simon & Tom Bloor, Pogus Caesar, Mona Casey, Faye Claridge, Juneau Projects, Kate Pemberton, Liz Rowe, and David Thomas. The resulting ten photographs document the practice of contemporary art in the West Midlands and establish a creative dialogue between the work of the artists and that of the photographers. See ‘The Art of Ideas: Artists’ Project’ for images.
These were featured on the limited edition map produced by artupdate.com
Internationally renowned artists and designers have been commissioned to create hand-made prototype habitats for the rapidly declining numbers of bird, bat and bee species in UK urban areas. These bird, bat and bee houses have been created using Phillips de Pury's waste material including cardboard, crates, invitations, catalogues, plastics and wood discarded in the process of packing, moving and installing art works.
Over 45 handmade prototypes will be auctioned on June 27 in London at Phillips de Pury & Company, the proceeds of which will benefit Adventure Ecology's Foundation, Sculpt the Future.
Additionally, the three most appropriate designs for manufacturing will be chosen and distributed through high-end premium retailers and museums. The proceeds of the sales will be donated to protect natural habitats.
The project aims to raise awareness about the endangered habitats of birds, bats and bees in the UK, while reusing corporate waste in a functional and imaginative way. It will also look at ways in which the designs could be produced for a wider market.
Artists and designers involved include:| Tomoko Azumi | Luis Berrios Negron |
| David Austen | Tom Price |
| Jurgen Bey | Raw Edges |
| Martino Gamper | Rolf Sachs |
| David Harrison | Sir Paul Smith |
| Stuart Haygarth | Michael Sodeau |
| Henry Krokatsis | Marcus Tremento |
| Max Lamb | Gavin Turk |
| Peter Marigold | Christopher Williams |
19th September – 19th October 2008
Private View, 6.30-8.30, 18th September
Biscuit Building, 10 Redchurch Street, London E2
Opening Hours: Wednesday to Friday 2-6, Saturday to Sunday 12-6 or by appointment
From Now to Eternity is a celebration of and debate around design, with a focus on one material: plastic.
Plastic is with us virtually from now to eternity: impervious to bacteria, acid, salt, rust, breakage and, in some cases, able to withstand heat, plastic is something of a miracle substance. One hundred years ago, when it was first invented, no one could have anticipated that plastic would present one of our biggest recycling challenges.
Arts Co is commissioning nine leading contemporary designers and design collectives to celebrate plastic through their work and look at ways to reduce our growing mountains of discarded plastic. Their ingenious creations will be on display at From Now to Eternity, an exhibition launching during the 2008 London Design Festival and continuing through Frieze Art Fair, at the Biscuit Building in London’s East End.
The designers will show how plastic’s versatility - transparent or opaque, hard or pliant, able to take on a myriad of colours and forms – can serve their creativity. Committee, Stuart Haygarth, Raw Edges and FAT take a witty, playful and imaginative approach: Committee will build on their improbable towers of household objects to create extraordinary designs, while Haygarth’s ebullient plastic chandelier is made from 1,000 exploded party poppers. Tomoko Azumi’s minimal, yet highly sensual work, Tom Price’s sculptural aesthetic and award-winning collective Troika, renowned for their pioneering use of technology, reveal the subtler possibilities of the medium. Shanghai-based WOKmedia are particularly keen to respond to this brief since China has become the recycling centre of the world, while Japanese designer Hiroko Shiratori will explore the indestructibility of plastic objects to create what she has called the ‘fossils’ of the future, thus giving them a new value.
Details of a talks programme, to accompany the exhibition, will be released in August.
Designers and architects include: Committee, FAT, Hiroko Shiratori, Raw Edges, Stuart Haygarth, Tom Price, Tomoko Azumi, Troika and WOKMedia.
From Now To Eternity Press Release (PDF)
5th-29th November 2008, Private View 4th November, Wednesday-Saturday, 11am-5pm
29 Thurloe Place, South Kensington, London, SW7 2HQ
Arts Co is pleased to present Atlantis, an exhibition by artist Gayle Chong Kwan. A graduate of Central Saint Martins, Chong Kwan has been involved in exhibitions both in the UK and internationally and last year unveiled her permanent installation for London Underground, Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Chong Kwan’s work is in various collections including Arts Council England and The Government Art Fund.
Atlantis is an enormous mythical landscape, a city created and carved out of semi-opaque used plastic food packaging, collected from people who live in London and covering the entire exhibition space. This new work is based on master-planning projects, developments in tourism, regeneration and urban planning. It questions notions of waste, climate change and how this fits into our planning of cities and communal living.
The architecture of Atlantis is inspired by ideas of the lost city, whose beauty was unequalled but which vanished in a day. First described by Plato in around 360 BC, Atlantis was catastrophically buried under the sea, and an earthquake was unleashed onto the island, triggering the flood. Often treated as a literary device, Atlantis entered into the popular imagination in the 1880’s. Expeditions continue to search in various sites for the remains of Atlantis.
Mythologised for its abundance of beautiful temples, embellished palaces, harbours and luscious vegetation, the Atlantis of this exhibition has been carved out of plastic food containers, whose discarded remains may be found at the bottom of many of our rivers and seas, forming their own kinds of horrific waste cities or constructions themselves. With premonitions of our rising water levels, questions surround whether we are creating or living in the Atlantis of the future.
The Atlantis installation will be accompanied by large-scale photographs on the surrounding walls exploring this enchanting and uncanny city of plastic.
The Art of Ideas encompassed:
1. Two evenings of talks
2. One evening of Art & Music – The Future of Sound Birmingham
Showcase
3. Commissioned Essays
4. An Artists’ Project
5. Cultural Art Map of Birmingham produced by artupdate
The talks, music performances, essays, artists' project, and the cultural art map of Birmingham aimed to shed light the West Midland’s rich and often overlooked cultural quality and diversity.
Speakers at the talks included Robert Yates - Assistant Editor, The Observer, Costa Award winning writer Catherine O’Flynn, James Yarker – Director, Stan’s Café, Stuart Murphy – Creative Director, TwoFour, award-winning musician Soweto Kinch, architect Sam Jacob of FAT – Fashion Architecture Taste, Gavin Wade – artist, curator & founder of Eastside Projects and curator & writer Matt Price.
The 'Future of Sound' Birmingham Showcase was convened by former Human League front man Martyn Ware and curated by Brian Duffy and Lewis Sykes, Director of Cybersonica. It featured Dreams of Tall Buildings, Juneau Projects, Modified Toy Orchestra, The Sancho Plan, and Soweto Kinch.
The commissioned essays were written by Catherine O’Flynn
and Matt Price addressing Birmingham's distinct identity and thriving
artistic life respectively.
The Other Birmingham:
Catherine O’Flynn (PDF)
The Other Birmingham:
Matt Price (PDF)
For the Artists' Project, West Midland Photographers Ravi Deepres, Chris Keenan, and David Rowan were commissioned to take the portraits of West Midland contemporary visual artists/art collectives in their studios. The artists photographed were Jane Anderson, Ayling & Conroy, Simon & Tom Bloor, Pogus Caesar, Mona Casey, Faye Claridge, Juneau Projects, Kate Pemberton, Liz Rowe, and David Thomas. The resulting ten photographs document the practice of contemporary art in the West Midlands and establish a creative dialogue between the work of the artists and that of the photographers. See ‘The Art of Ideas: Artists’ Project’ for images.
These were featured on the limited edition map produced by artupdate.com
The Art of Ideas was part of a market development initiative developed by Arts Co for Arts Council England, Birmingham City Council and Business Link, exploring the place of art and creativity in shaping the West Midlands.
