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pinkweddingshoebuddy on Flooded Portaloos! mark on The Blue Blob Mike on COMING SOON… Beverly Belshaw on Sustainabilitree Brian on Leaves, leaves and more l…
…and i am holding my ground :S
All packed and ready for set-up tomorrow! (It feels a bit like i am going on holiday in the morning, especially with my scheduled 6am start), but unfortunately there are no bikinis in sight…it’s all white tac and hammers etc!
I am looking forward to seeing my Bog Standard Gallery once again, after it’s visit to family and friends at Superloos! Lets just hope all the deliveries arrive in the right number of pieces!…
The Sustainabilitree is uprooting and embarking upon it’s journey to London 
Hoping to see you all at The Sustainabilitree Show!
3 days!
A Sustainability themed art exhibition
Open daily 12-4 pm; on selected performance evenings the exhibition will open from 6pm-8pm, Friday 26th June 2009 – Monday 6th July 2009
Curated by Melanie Warner, after whose own biodegradeable sculpture the show is named; this diverse collection of media from emerging British Artists aims to inspire and provoke debate around issues of sustainability and the environment.
From the spectral and elegant ‘World on Stilts’ by Helen Edling to the absorbing abstract beauty of Billy Style’s ice paintings these exhibits offer a rich feast for thought. Warner has invited all the artists to make inventory of the materials and quantities used in their creation.
‘These details fascinate me’, she explains’ and are part of a conscious attempt from the arts community to take stock of our attitudes to materials and waste’. The ‘Sustainabilitree’(2009) itself is made from corn and starch based bioplastic. Standing over 3 metres high it holds 10,000 individually cut leaves. Ghostly objects (cassette tapes, remote controls) visible under the ‘bark’ hint at the pace of moving technology whilst the bio-based,degradeable polymers offer an optimistic alternative to petro plastics and landfill future for such objects. Necessarily impermanent the tree has already dropped leaves which visibly compost at its base and indicate the work’s eventual complete disintegration and re-absorption into the soil.
Demonstrating an imaginative end use Ally Rosenburg’s startlingly engaging busts ‘Chewing Gum Woman’ and ‘Teabag Man’ are formed from – as you can probably guess from their titles, used chewing gum and teabags. A case here no doubt of ‘where there’s muck there’s brass’.
I have never been a fan of personalised number plates, until i saw this…
…and thought i could be quite tempted!
On Thursday i attended a reception at the House of Lords.
(I didn’t realise this was being taken, but if you look carefully you can see Sam’s hair!)
Hosted by the Breast Cancer Campaign i was invited along with Sam as a thank you for the money we raised for them last summer on our sponsored cycle from London to Paris.
It was great to meet some of the scientists who spend the money raised in trying to beat breast cancer. It was also extremely humbling to hear of peoples experiences and reasons for fund raising for this cause.
Also of great interest, was the chance to photographs the toilet signs
Not such great photos as i had to take them on my mobile, but non the less, another 2 to add to my collection!
Pilot’s miracle escape as plane crash lands … on a pile of Portaloos
By Eddie Wrenn
With his plane stalling at 150 feet, and no time to return to the runway, the pilot of a Cessna 182 was probably in need of the toilet.
Luckily, he found a whole pile of them, and the crash landing on top of piles of portable loos probably saved his life.
The Cessna 182 crashed on Friday afternoon in Washington state after taking off from Thun Field, an airfield owned by Pierce County southeast of Tacoma.
Crash land: The Cessna plane lands on the pile of portable loos
The plane was about 150 feet (45 meters) in the air when the engine quit.
Sheriff’s spokesman Ed Troyer said the pilot tried to turn around to land but didn’t quite make it.
The plane hit a fence, flipped over and landed upside down on top of the portable toilets standing in a storage yard.
The pilot, whose identity has not been released, was able to walk away apparently unharmed.
Landing: The pilot, who has not been identified, was able to walk away from the wreckage
I love receiving photos of toilet signs, but this picture really made me smile. So thanks to Elliott Loo Hire for sending it in!
Elliott Loo Hire was where i got my portaloo from back in 2007, so it’s quite sad really to see all it’s extended family looking like this!
Bog Standard Gallery has spent the past few months trapped inside a garage. Sadly the owner of the garage in which the gallery was being stored passed away, leaving no way of getting her out!
The good news is that Bog Standard Gallery is now out, and free! And is currently residing with close family and friends at the Superloos depot!!
Bog Standard Gallery will be back on the road in June, with a new exhibition about Waste.
…’The Sustainabilitree Show’
@ Arts Depot, London
25th June – 7th July 2009
www.sustainabilitree.co.uk
I was wondering if there are any of you in Poland that could perhaps send me some photos of the toilet signs??
Please send them to info@bogstandardgallery.com
Many many thanks!
It’s never quite the plan, or even anticipated at the start of a project but there always seems to be quite a large element of repetition in my work. Having spent the past days and weeks continuously cutting out leaves for my ‘Sustainabilitree’ i think my right hand has now moudled itself to the shape of my scissors. Knowing that i would need in excess of 8000 leaves for the tree, i was adamant that i wanted to cut them by hand. This was largely because i wanted each leaf to be unique. I was aiming for the Sustainabilitree to be as realistic as possible to fit in with the fact that it would biodegrade back to nature in the same cycle that a real tree would. I also had worked out in advance that i would be able to cut out 5 leaves at a time using scissors. In reality, this didn’t prove very easy so, i literally cut each leaf out one at at time…
So here are all the components…
The Trunk – the plastic objects visible through the bark demonstrate the items that bioplastics can now be used to replace. (Photo taken on possibly the only day of summer this year 
)
The Branches:
And the Leaves:
,
After another successful exhibition in Manchester (I won an award for originality ), it was time to say goodbye to my little yellow caravan.
As heartbreaking as it was to let her go, storage and logistics had proved to be quite a nightmare. Especially since being in London where finding a little green field to store her was an impossible task!
I had previously been storing the caravan on a farm in between exhibitions, but the thought about doing this indefinately worried me about the condition she would get into. I would rather see her go to a nice home now, than keep her a little while longer but then have to send her to a scrap heap at some point down the line!
So, after lots of thought, deliberation and changing my mind most days, i decided that now it’s the start of the summer, i would like her to go to a loving home with lots of children so that they can be getting pleasure and use out of it. (I was still undecided with 3 minutes to go on the ebay auction so got my boyfriend to bid…satisfied that he was the highest bidder and that i got to keep the caravan, i left the room…only to come back to my computer and see that he had been outbid in the last 3 minutes!) Gutted!
So off she goes to meet her new and adoring family in Yorkshire…
The photograph below shows the brown biodegradable sheet i have been working with to make the bark of my biodegradable tree for Stanelco PLC.
Thermo-forming sections of this brown sheet over the clay mould (shown above) transfers the texture imprinted on the mould to the biodegradable plastic sheet. I made the mould by using the clay to adopt the texture of a real tree bark. Once i have formed enough sections of bark i will melt all the small sections of together and will eventually have what will be the trunk of the tree.
As well as the bark texture the trunk will take on the shape of familiar plastic shapes in certain parts of the trunk as seen in the photographs below.
After cutting all the bark sections out i saved all the left over bits to use to make the branches – REUSING
To follow, the branch making…
