Inspiring stuff #3

Free Improvisation Music

Roger Turner is by far one of the most exciting drummers I’ve ever encountered. He plays like a thunderstorm; crashing and exploding one minute, clattering and splashing around the kit the next. 

Free Improvisation music is as polarizing as Marmite but I don’t know why it should be. Perhaps in throwing away the map and refusing to stick to verse/chorus/middle eight/break patterns it leaves people feeling lost and unsure of how to listen.

This is what I like most about it though. 

You navigate it, at least I do, in the same way you would the sounds of the everyday world around you – footsteps/a car passing/someone practicing on a piano in a nearby building.

Only it becomes more exciting than the everyday because each sound is made to walk a tightrope of chance and the whim of the performer.

It reminds me of August Strindberg’s 1894 essay On Chance in Artistic Creation in which he writes:

I've been told that the Malays drill holes in the bamboo stalks that grow in their forests. When the wind blows, they lie on the ground to listen to the symphonies produced by these gigantic Aeolian harps. The strange thing is that each listener hears a unique tune and a unique harmony, all according to the whim of
the wind. 

Inspiring Stuff #2

Being Unique: Gaetano Pesce at the Barbican

Gaetano Pesce is an Italian designer who has been blurring lines between beauty and utility for over 40 years. Whether working on furniture, jewellery, fashion, or Architecture, his designs aspire to become art with function. He is driven by the idea of uniqueness and that people be given the opportunity to actively explore this - whether through their own design, or through adapting one of his own creations. The Fontessa shoe, for example,  is designed to be cut and re-formed by the user.

Speaking at the Barbican last night, he made a point that I found particularly interesting: visual design - whatever its form - is a method of communication. The message can be determined and anchored in the design itself - the manicled foot stool as a commentary on female emancipation for example - or it can be purely suggestive - as in the primitive shapes of his house in Bahia. Either way, to design in basic shapes, to build standardised high-rise block towers (yes, I'm looking at you Liverpool street), is to design mute.

Inspiring Stuff #1

Objects as Theatre: Ceramics and Edmund de Waal

At some point I thought I'd struck upon an interesting idea - 'objects as theatre' . Why not strip away the actors completely, I thought. Why not create Mary Celeste type worlds in which all the action happens off stage! Or more precisely; worlds at which we arrive late - where the action has already taken place, leaving the objects to resonate with experienced drama!

And then I stumbled upon Edmund de Waal... What I love about his work (ceramics specifically because I've not read The Hare with Amber Eyes) is his understanding of the drama of objects. His work explores the relationship between 'things' - very often simple pots in varrying shades of white. Their composition is always poetic and often concerned as much with what is there as with what is not. What I mean is that they are structured in such a way that the silences, the blank spaces, are as important as the pots themselves. Silence is an interesting description actually because many of his ceramic filled vitrines feel as though they could be 'played', as if the pots are scored notes waiting to be interpreted and heard.

One of his largests vitrines is hidden in the roof of the V&A in London - you can see it from the lobby if you peer up and beyond the giant coloured chandelier. My first thought is that space must be as important in the display of his 'pieces' as it is in the structure and composition of the objects which make them. For me, this playfulness makes his vitrines as enjoyable as opening an old book to find a forgotten love letter or shopping list. They are each little worlds within worlds.

Coming Soon!

Watch this space! I just bought a new pen!