Camley Street Natural Park

October 2009

Camley Street Natural Park lies between the Eurostar rail tracks between paris and st. Pancras and Regents canal, it is on the edge of the new Kings Cross redevelopement, and is the site for our landscape architeture project, this term at university. As a start to the project we were asked to visit the site and record our initial emotional response to it. The site consists of several areas based around a pond, including young, light woodland, marshland and meadowland, the site is largely left to develop as nature intends, excluding a small mown area at the northern end of the site where there are two large cages housing rabbits. There is an advanced composting system used on the site and there are also alot of community based initiatives run from the site. The only buildings on the site are used to run these community endevours from and also as a classroom for schools in the Camden area, there are also tables outside the buildings where small plants grown on the site are sold to the general public. The photo below shows my emotional response to the site; the view over the river shoes the old warehouses the other side, so it is a view of industrialism framed by nature, i felt the site was a haven of calm and natural serenity in comparison to directly outside the site which is an extremely busy city transport hub, cold and grey and busy. The ripples in the water also reflect this feeling; there is some sort of change in the water surface at a point close to Camley Street, the ripples stop (reflecting the rush and movement of a busy city), and a calm pool starts (relecting the shelter and calm Camley Street provides).

University College Hospital

October 2009

There was a small art exhibition along the entrance to the university college hospital:

"The art in the new University College Hospital has been made to create a welcoming, uplifting environment for patients, visitors and staff and in so doing improve patient well being, boost staff morale and widen access to the arts across the trust. Recent evidence shows that an engaging and stimulating hospital environment can assist in quicker recovery rates for patients as well as help with the recruitment and retention of staff." 

The artwork was from the Slade School of Fine art and the exhibition seemed to be based along the lines of nature / gardens and the artists' perceptions of and reactions to these things. There were several peices which i found beautiful and interesting. One piece in particular  caught my attention, which was a black and white photograph of a garden from outside the garden with the tree (which looks like a monkey puzzle or chile pine (Araucaria araucana)) painted in black acrylic paint. It is a really strong image from an interesting view point. There was also a beautiful 3D piece which created a bizarre optical illusion, but was just pins stuck into a surface, simple but beautiful and interesting.

 

Telling Tales: Fantasy and Fear in Contemporary Design

V + A

" The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it once was the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. the first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales."

Walter Benjamin

I went to see this exhibition after the Teach-in in the V + A. It was a selection of furniture and product design based on fantasy and fairy tale. I found it a fascinating exhibition; disturbing and bizarre, but enthralling. Topics ranged from classic fairy tales referring to childhood and good vs evil to more sinister and adult fears and fantasies. The exhibition was split into three sections; The Forest Glade, The Enchanted Castle and Heaven and Hell. Some designs which really caught my attention were 'princess Chair', 'Witch chair', 'Petit Jardin chair' and 'Fig Leaf wardrobe' all the work of Tord Boontje; I felt his work really captured the inspiring and magical essence of the fairy tale, which I personally find inspirational and have used as a concept in a Landcsape project for a childrens playground (Hampton Hill Junior School, Adult Learning Facility 2008). I especially liked the complete contrast between the child like innocence and fairy tale- princess- magic  evoked in 'Princess chair' and  the cynisism and evil refelected in 'Witch chair'. I found it interesting that you, viewing the object, can form such a strong  emotional response to an inanimate object based purely on preconceptions conceived at childhood. All of the objects and furniture in the exhibition seemed to be created to make people question their perception of everyday objects. 

LINK to my own work; Landscape Architecture project based on a Fairy tale concept.

V + A Teach In 

12 October 2009

I attended the Teach-In at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which was a series of lectures and talks based on environmental issues, sustainability, global warming and climate change. The first lecture was from Richard Hawkins, on Climate Safety, which was really interseting, informative and terrifying- Predictions that by 2040 all ice will have melted and predictions that when the permafrost melts the amount of Co2 and Methane released will be higher than all emissions now. The second lecture was on Ecological Literacy by Jody Boehnert, she introduced to us the six degrees of climate change, a future scenario featured in Ecomag No. 1 (June 2009). Which were a series of beautiful illustrations and artistic interpretations by six different artists responding to the book 'Six degrees' by Mark Lynas,

 which was compiled from hundreds of scientific papers describing the projected changes with each degree of climate warming. (see below)

Artwork: Kate Evans. 1 Degree: "Consider the thought that living species, which have evolved on this planet over millions of years, could be destroyed for ever in the space of one human generation."
Artwork: Airside. 2 Degrees: "A three degree rise in global temperature - something that could happen as early as 2050 - effectively reverses the carbon cycle. Instead of absorbing Co2 vegetation and soil starts releasing it in massive quantities, as soil bacteria work faster to break down organic matter in a hotter environment, and plant growth goes into reverse. ... in other words the Hadley centre's team had discovered that carbon cycle possible feedbacks could tip the planet into a runaway global warming spiral by the middle of this century ..."
Artwork: Rob Hunt. 3 Degrees: " For an anologue of the three degree world we have to go back ... before the earth its regular cycle of ice ages and interglacial. We have to go back a full 3 million years, to a period of time called the Pliocene. Continentals glaciers were almost entirely absent - contributing to a sea level 25 metres higher than todays. ... if emissions go on rising as they are , global temperatures could shoot past 3 degrees as early as 2050."

Artwork: Jamie Slimmon. 4 Degrees: "Poplulation will be flocking north, to overcrowded refuges in the Baltic, Scandinavia and the British Isles... but with habitable areas becoming more and more crowded, conflict may come sooner rather than later even in temperate civilised Europe."

Artwork: Jody Barton. 5 Degrees: "With five degrees of global warming, an entirely new planet is coming into being - one largely unrecognisable from the Earth we know today... Humans are herded into shrinking zones of habitability by the twin crises of drought and flood."

Artwork:Leona Clarke. 6 Degrees: "Hotter oceans bring hurricanes, far outdoing anything we see today. these superhurricanes (Hypercanes) wil have enough energy to the North pole and back, perhaps even allowing them to repeatedly circumnavigate the globe."

There were then lectures from Andrew Simms, Emma Dewbury and Ben Gill on Ecological Debt, Nurturing ecological habits of mind in Design and One planet living respectively. Also speaking were Jonathon Crinion, Creativity: A Social Ecological Approach, Stephanie Hankey, Design Activism and John Thackara, Three Step plan for Universities. All lectures were interseting, but some more than others, I didn't last til the end of the day; i found it an awful lot of information to take in at one time.