ghanaian coffins

These coffins, made in Accra, Ghana reflect the unfulfilled dreams, and even the trade of the dead person.

The story goes that in the first half of last century one Ata Owoo was well-known for making magnificent chairs to transport the village chief on poles or the shoulders of minions.

When Owoo had finished one particularly elaborate creation, an eagle, a neighbouring chief wanted one too, this time in the shape of a cocoa pod. A major crop in Ghana.

However, the chief next door died before the bean was finished and so it became his coffin.

Then in 1951, the grandmother of one of Owoo's apprentices died.

She had never been in an aeroplane, so he built her one for her funeral, and the 50 year old tradition was born.

Objectified

Objectified is a feature-length documentary film examining the role of everyday objects, and the people who design them, in our daily lives. The film is directed by Gary Hustwit, who was also responsible for the film Helvetica. Something very worth while watching in the light of your current project

Pablo Reinoso

Maarten Bass

Surrounded by all kinds of objects,
Baas created an assemblage, in which
all objects gained a new function. A
chair became a bookshelf; a lampshade
became a vase, a violin a coat rack.
For this design, Baas collaborates
with several second hand stores in
the region of Eindhoven, saving products
from the rubbish container which could
not be sold in the shop. Since the
products are always different, every
“Hey, chair be a bookshelf!” is a
unique piece. The often weak second
hand products are reinforced by
polyester and coated by hand, in a
Poly-Urethane coating.

find more here.

Dunne and raby

A collection of 'adult' furniture for the Medici Gardens in Rome. see it and other work here.

Afghan War Rugs

Keeping the war theme Afghan war rugs include hand woven images from both the Soviet and the current ongoing conflict. Little is know as to why the locals produce them, but they certainly change the warm and homely meaning of a rug. look here for the Fyke collection of rugs online.

Gold plated weapons

Keeping the gold theme, during the war in Iraq a collection of gold weapons belonging to Sadam Hussein was found, harking back to a time when materials of warfare and decoration were considered at the same time; in turn changing the connotations of the object.

Daniel Eatock

Gold Bic Pen Cap
solid gold, cast from the cap of a Bic pen

'By replacing the cap of a standard Bic pen with a cast gold replica, this ubiquitous, generic writing implement is aligned with aspirations of luxury and trophies of academic and corporate achievement. It transforms the Bic pen it covers from a disposable tool into a hybrid carrier of value its owner might not want to misplace.'

Daniel Eatock's work ranges from high end commercial graphic design to what could almost be classed as pure art practice. Objects are a continued theme in many of his projects. see more here.

Picasso

Cabaret Videos.

Here are the links to everyones cabaret documentation:

Group1

Group2

Group3

Group4

Group5

Group6

Group7

Group8

Group9 (see below)

Group10

Group11

The Drawing Room

Best Laid Plans

11 November 2010 – 23 January 2011

Gallery open Wednesday – Sunday 12.00 to 18.00

(gallery closed 20 Dec - 5 Jan 2011)

The artists in this exhibition use different forms of drawing to create models for alternative ways of living in or viewing the modern world. Strategic planning is associated with ‘objective’ graphic forms such as maps, diagrams, graphs, charts and sketches. Turning such a notion on its head, the works in this exhibition explore fantastical scenarios, impossible geographies, new beings and habitats and subtle subversions of life as we know it. The international artists in Best Laid Plans exploit the positive potential of human fallibility and explore it as a force for imagining new forms of organisation and existence.

http://www.drawingroom.org.uk/

The Museum of Everything

By Helen Sumpter Posted: Mon Sep 20 2010

With Sir Peter Blake's private collections of art curios, taxidermy and memorabilia about to go on display at the Museum of Everything, he takes Helen Sumpter on a magical mystery tour.

Behind a pair of anonymous gates in west London, genial British pop art pioneer Sir Peter Blake is taking me on a tour of his expansive two-floor studio. For anyone with even a slight interest in the visual aesthetic of vintage circuses and fairgrounds, music memorabilia, Victorian taxidermy, folk art or sporting and theatrical curios, this is the equivalent of being a kid in a candy shop. The space is stuffed with art, found objects and ephemera that Blake has collected, categorised and arranged, for his own pleasure, over his 60-year career.

'So this is all Elvis stuff - one of my little put-together museums', he explains, 'which includes an Elvis-branded condom; “Elvis” written on a grain of rice; signed photos and three tickets for the next concert Elvis would have done, if he hadn't died. This next room has a collection of dolls - there's some Aunt Sally heads and cloth dolls by the English designer Norah Wellings, with faces all based on Shirley Temple. And this room is basically all collage - here's a framed collection of lipstick kisses by an artist called David Inshaw. I think that they might have been all the girls that he had affairs with.' Elsewhere there's a full-size waxwork of boxer Sonny Liston, the shoes worn by the famous Victorian dwarf General Tom Thumb and Blake's own work, including an entire exhibition he is preparing for Waddington Galleries in November, for which he is paying homage to ten artists who have inspired him, including Joseph Cornell and Kurt Schwitters.

'I began my collecting when I started in the Junior Art Department at Gravesend School of Art when I was 14. There was a junkyard next to the station and on my first visit I bought a set of leather-bound Shakespeare, a papier maché tray and a painting of the Queen Mary that happened to be a kind of outsider art, and it all started from there.'

Although Blake's collections were never created for public display, for the first time a significant proportion of them will be going on show as part of a new exhibition ('Exhibition #3'), curated with James Brett at Primrose Hill's Museum of Everything. It's a good pairing. The stealth hit from last year's Frieze Art Fair month, the first Museum of Everything exhibition, which Blake contributed to, was inspired by Brett's fascination with extraordinary artworks and objects, all created in private by untrained individuals, working outside the mainstream. This time the idea of non-traditional art is being extended to include not only Blake's collections but other categories and collections of self-taught creativity that share similar themes and a similar aesthetic.

One such example is Potter's Museum of Curiosity. Begun in 1861 by Victorian taxidermist Walter Potter, the final collection amounted to 6,000 stuffed animals, many arranged in elaborate and quirky tableaux, such as 'The Guinea Pigs' Cricket Match' featuring 34 guinea pigs in a country cricket game and school classroom of rabbits. The collection was split up and sold at auction in 2003 but James Brett is trying to borrow back as many of the major pieces as possible for this show. Damien Hirst will be among those lending works and two will be coming from Blake, who attended the sale. 'I first came across the collection by chance when I was out cycling as a teenager and it was the most extraordinary thing. At the auction I sat with David Bailey for a lot of the time. He bought some skulls and Harry Hill was also there, I think he bought the world's smallest dog.'

Punch and Judy puppetry, the circus and the fairground are other potential themes that are emerging for the exhibition and elements of Carter's Steam Fair (of which both Blake and Brett are fans) may also be incorporated into the final selection.

At the age of 78, Blake shows no sign of slowing down, mentioning current projects as diverse as a painting commission for the Knight Bachelors' chapel in St Paul's Cathedral and a collaboration on a garden for next year's Chelsea Flower Show, for the British Heart Foundation. But for the next few weeks he'll be concentrating on the Museum of Everything. 'The exhibition is still evolving so it might go off in all different directions before it opens. In a way it's a conceptual art piece, we're just not quite sure what the concept is yet. But what we do know is that people will walk around and there will be things to look at and it probably won't be what anyone expects'.

'Exhibition #3' is open from October 13-December 24 2010 at the Museum of Everything.

Jacques Tati's Play Time

Playtime (1967), shot in 70mm, was the most risky and expensive work of Tati's career. Many of the figures in this film are cardboard cutouts. The stainless steel is really photographic prints stuck onto the walls and floor.

Though Playtime was a critical success (François Truffaut praised it as "a film that comes from another planet, where they make films differently"), it was a massive and expensive commercial failure, eventually resulting in Tati's bankruptcy.

Willian Kentridge

Automatic Writing

Russell Crotty

Cotty's drawing begins with direct, intimate exploration of the landscape and making on-site field notes in personal sketchbooks. The resulting observations are then translated onto globes, books or single drawings, some containing text.

Peter Arkle

'Peter Arkle News' is a self published newspaper depicting all aspects of the british born illustrators life in New York, all of these disparate elements combine to produce a feeling of the environment he inhabits. More here.

Chris Ware

Ware's work has the ability to depict public and private space/place but also the passing of time including while elements of social commentary.

Adam Dant

Dant creates dense, cartoon like drawings, often possessed of a dysfunctional semicircular logic. Mishap and folly proliferate his work. Museums are common subjects, as are maps and complicated jokes. Dant's works often take the form of wall hung drawings and have been described as Hogarthian or Swiftian especially in relation to his use of satire.
His new work continues Adam Dant's interest in depicting and interacting with the public space, the anecdotal and Utopian grand models.

Joan Hassall

Rembrandt

Rembrandt's landscape etchings, along with other dutch artist from the same period, depict space and objects within it with ease and fluidity. Though this image is fairly detailed, click on it for a larger version, his more minimal landscape work still hold the same weight.

Marc Bell

Though not directly representative or environment Bell's drawings have diagrammatic geological, archaeological qualities seemingly referring to many spaces and places at once.

Stephen Walter

This vast work imagining London as an island can be viewed in more detail here along with Walters other visually dense mapping work.

George Grosz

Learn more about Mr Grosz here.
His angry, 'biting' satire results in acute and unforgiving depictions of Berliners C1920. The line work is exemplary and his powers of observation hard won - lots of hours/days of drawing from life.

Andre Masson

Masson was one main figures of the surrealists movement, a keen exponent of automatic drawing. Masson would often force himself to work under strict conditions, for example, after long periods of time without food or sleep, or under the influence of drugs. He believed forcing himself into a reduced state of consciousness would help his art be free from rational control, and hence get closer to the workings of his subconscious mind.

Desmond Paul Henry

Desmond Paul Henry ranks among one of the few early British pioneers of Computer Art/Graphics of the 1960's. During this period he constructed a total of three mechanical drawing machines (in 1960, '63 and '67) based around the components of analogue bombsight computers. Henry’s life-long passion for all things mechanical inspired him to purchase an army surplus analogue bombsight computer in the early 1950s. For years he would gaze transfixed at the ‘peerless parabolas’ (Henry) of its inner working parts when in motion. Then in the early sixties he decided to try and capture these mechanical motions on paper and so was born the first of a series of three drawing machines based around the components of the bombsight computer itself.

Cy Twombly

Cy Twombly's calligraphic work is elegant but somehow awkward at the same time. It plays with the letter forms that are reproduced by us intuitively every day, and the materials of chalk and blackboards which are loaded with meanings pertaining to the teaching and learning process.

Nick White

As with Nick White's work, think how through focus on the process and materials used while drawing images can form and grow intuitively.

Daniel Zeller

video of daniel zeller working in his studio gives a good insight to the materials/methods and the overall time needed to produce such dense and visually intricate images. While engaging with drawing process try to keep communication of ideas as a central theme, don't slip into simple surface decoration.

Richard Long

Lines drawn on the earth by repeated walking of a line. Working within the movement of land art Long's work can show you the limits of what a drawing can be.