Malvern Exhibition of Contemporary Art (MECA), Church Walk, Malvern, Worcestershire.
4th – 31st October 2009
‘Bog Standard Signs’
New photograghs from my ‘Bog Standard Signs’ series will be exhibited at the Malvern Exhibition of Contemporary Art from the 5th October 2009.
More details coming soon..
…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!…
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!
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
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…
My little yellow caravan appears once again after having been in hibernation for the winter.
Panic set in on her arrival at the exhibition after realising the keys seemed to have gone for a wander and there was no means of entry. Weirdly my mum had found a mouldy key in our house the day before and surely enough it opened the door instantly!
After this exhibition the caravan will hopefully be sold. It will be quite a sad moment for me, as after painting it over a period of a year with 24 litres of yellow paint and 40 000 polka dots, and i am very much attached to it!
However, every time i look down at my clothes i always see a little blob of yellow paint that just somehow managed to get onto everything i own so the caravan won’t seem too far away!
I would like to apologise to the friend i referred to in the post below regarding his wastage of plastic bottles over his daily water consumption.
News just in is that he is well aware, and full of guilt about this wastage and therefore now chooses to consume his daily water allowance by filling a plastic cup with water from a water cooler.
800% less plastic bottles – it sounds impressive!
BUT still too much wasted plastic! Further questioning led him to admit to using a different cup each time he has a drink! Based on the fact that these cups hold significantly less water than a bottle, and telling me he drinks about 7 cups a day, i am not convinced he is saving that much plastic!
I hope this post guilts him into using one cup per day – that would be a good start!
Oh, and he did tell me this whilst he was paying for a packet of pitta bread which he then put inside 2 plastic bags to carry it across the road from the shop to his flat!
My friend, i think you just dug yourself one huge hole!
Toothbrushes
Toothpaste tubes
Toiletry bottles
Straws
Bubble wrap
Earphones
Collanders
Rulers
Yogurt pots
Bottle tops
CDs
Tapes
Ketchup bottles
Hangers
Phones
Plugs
Milk bottles
Buckets
Watering Cans
Kitchen Spatulas etc
Cutlery
Spectacles
Drinks bottles
Credit Cards
Computer peripherals
Chargers
Games consoles
Pens
Razors
Pritt Stick tubes
Pencil sharpeners
Watch straps
Set squares
Telephone sockets
Plug Sockets
Light switches
Sandwich boxes
Calculators
Missed anything?? Let me know please!
Lots of things are new for 2008, mainly because i am now living in London
I seem to spend a lot of my days driving around roundabouts not quite knowing which turning to come off at and usually still don’t know until i have tried every exit but the one i should have taken!
I shouldn’t complain too much about driving though, as i have just signed up to cycle from Tower Bridge in London to the Eiffel Tower in Paris! I will cycling these 200 miles over a period of 3 days, over the back holiday weekend in August, raising funds for the Breast Cancer Campaign. I am sure you will agree that this is an extremely worthwhile cause, and if you wold like to sponsor me you can do so at www.justgiving.com/melaniewarner
Happy New Year!
|
 | danielle glover on Portaloo Heaven |
 | pinkweddingshoebuddy on Flooded Portaloos! |
 | mark on The Blue Blob |
 | Mike on COMING SOON… |
 | Beverly Belshaw on Sustainabilitree |
