29 September 2011

28 September 2011

Found on Folksy

Inspiration and Creativi-tea!  Fancy a Jammy Dodger with your cuppa - head off to FoundOnFolksy blog to look at the latest treats - this lovely tin can teapot is by Rebecca Sims.
http://www.folksy.com/items/2056113

24 September 2011

What is Craft

Jeroen Verhoeven
Excellent piece in the V & A website about defining what is craft from key figures in the industry at all levels - well worth a read!  Here's a little taste below from Edmund de Waal - Practitioner.

'Craft is a starting place, a set of possibilities.  It avoids absolutes, certainties, over-robust definitions, solace.  It offers places, interstices, where objects and people meet.  It is unstable, contingent.  It is about experience.  It is about desire.  It can be beautiful.'

20 September 2011

Found on Folksy : Inspiration

My first blog for FoF!!  Thanks to Kirsten for inviting me and I look forward to getting to know the team!  I'm delighted to have been asked!  A brief intro on 'inspiration'.
coolmummy
Dee - the creator of this great piece of work mentioned that if you want to know how to make the bike theme decoupage piece I featured,  she have a free tutorial blog that shows a step-by-step picture and word tutorial on how to decoupage (as well as many other cool projects).  FoF Link

19 September 2011

Creative Interviews : Hazel Terry

I'm on home ground this week with a very special friend and it's been such a privilege to know Hazel. She's an artist and an art educator, passionate about all aspects of art, craft and design. Hazel loves finding treasure and magic and sharing the creativity and inventiveness of wonderful artists and makers in her amazing The Art Room Plant blog.  I've managed to tie her down to get these answers from her!!
Hazel with Freya
How would you describe yourself in five words
workaholic, scatty, kind, patient, happy

How would your friends describe you
Mad, Wild, Hairy, Scarey, Crazy
Superscoop
Give me the names of 3 objects or things you dislike most and why
Rubbish, I cannot stand rubbish and how the problem of people littering seems to be growing exponentially.

Polystyrene, I wish it and other non biodegradable human products could be uninvented, and in this I include nuclear products.

Inconsiderate or unkind treatment of people, animals, plants and the planet.
Mustaches
Tell me about something you've achieved
I don't know quite what to put here, I don't feel I have achieved my potential yet and that is probably what drives me to work so hard in so many spheres,at home, teaching and in my practice as an artist.

My proudest achievement was hand rearing a sparrow, I love animals and life, I hate to see it wasted.
Gran and Hen
What’s your ideal working day.
I suppose it is crazy, but this is how most of my days are, and though I think though they are possibly a bit on the full side, I seem to work best when I have a lot of plates spinning.

I get up early at 5am or 6am and hit the ground running. I get the most and the best work done before my family get up in the quiet daylight of the early morning.

I love my teaching work, I teach such a variety of people and a variety of subjects that it is very satisfying, especially when I get my students to work on a project that blows their minds and they all buzz with ideas, excitement and creative comeradery.

In the evenings after my family are fed and cleaned etc I get back to my work. Usually I work at the kitchen table or if I am painting, at the kitchen wall.

Maybe I am too noisy and sociable, I don't have or crave a quiet studio away from it all. The draw back of this is that everything has to be done and cleaned away before I can start.
Red Riding Hood & The Wolf
Who influences you creatively.
No one individual, movement or genre of art or craft, the full spectrum of art, craft, fashion, photography and design constantly bombard me with inspiration. I have often been in trouble with art schools and other establishments for not belonging to one class of art.

I got in trouble at Belfast (York Street) for trying to transfer to Fine art from Fine craft design. At ECA for making a film for my final Painting degree. People want to find a draw to pop you into, a label to slap on your forehead. I am too interested in too many things and I keep pealing off the label. Sometimes I do feel it is my downfall and if I channeled all that energy and effort into one form of practice, then I would have been more successful . . . but then would I be me?

Are you usually late, early or right on time
Always early, I do not like to be late
Bird
How do you start on a piece of work? (I usually clean the house!)
haha I clean the house! I need order to be able to work even though I am often accused of not seeing my mess, but I do see most of it and everyone elses.

I usually wake up in the middle of the night with an idea, sometimes I write it down in the dark in a wee book beside my bed. In the morning if I am free of other projects I start it, and then I work on it till it is finished. If ever I go onto something else, the original work is doomed, I rarely go back.
Skrimshaw
Where would you go in the world for inspiration
All over it, on the internet! The kitchen table - my daughter is at a great age and she is prolific, I love her interpretation of the world.

Away from it all, if I can I like to go away to very remote places and just be. I have had the luxury of a job with a decent length of holiday and the use of my great uncles remote house in France. This is heaven for me as the wildlife is abundant and every year something different features, hoopoes, hares, frogs etc. It is the tonic for my working life and a time when I always feel I get my self back and can be really free.
Early Work
What piece of work are you most proud of
Thinking about it , It would not be a piece of art work by myself, there are pieces over the years that I still love, but 'proud of' that is something different.

I am proud of collaborations with others and most proud probably when it does not involve people who are identified as being 'arty' or 'creative'.

November last year for example, when again on a night thought, we managed to get the whole college making and wearing mustaches for the male cancer charity 'Movember'.  It was spontaneous, fun and creative for so many different people and it made lots of money for a worthy charity.
Movember
Laughter makes me proud, maybe I am in the wrong profession!

What would you like to develop further or learn to do
My photography, I love people, so taking photographs of them is just the best fun for me, but I am not technical about my photography, I haven't read the manual.

Also I wish I could learn to remember names it is a large and terrible failing of mine.

Who do you think I should interview next
Piet Hein Eeek : Greenupgrader
Piet Hein the Dutch furniture designer.
Garbage : Greenupgrader
Garbage the French recycled lighting man.

Christien Meindertsma : Textile Source Blog
Christien Meindertsma, she is amazing. . . so many wonderful artists designers and crafts people out there.

Thanks so much Hazel. It's been a delight for me and it was great going through all your work. Cheers me dear!  First pint's on me!

Hazel's links :

The Art Room Plant

Flickr

Furniture & Interior Design Blog

Fashion Blog

14 September 2011

Katsuyo Aoki

Currently, Katsuyo use ceramics in his method of expression, incorporating various decorative styles, patterns, and symbolic forms as his principal axis in creating works.

10 September 2011

Etsy Treasury Feature


Thanks so much Anna for featuring my work!!!! Much appreciated!  Anna's Shop

Creative Interviews : Timor Cohen aka Timohandmade

By coincidence I'm in Israel again chatting with Timor Cohen who's 31 and lives in Jaffa, Israel. It’s a port city and the port itself is a only a few minutes walk from her house. She studied painting in a master class in Israel and Italy.

Her home is also her studio, and is now her main source of livelihood, though she sometimes does some design work for others and still manages to teach painting one day a week. Ok Timor, over to you with your answers ...
How would you describe yourself in five words
Open Curious Moody Routine-less Creative
Give me the names of 3 objects or things you dislike most and why

1. Bananas (it's obvious why)
2. Bureaucracy (paperwork, bills, numbers, binders and reports do not do me any good)
3. Intolerance, unnecessary suffering
Tell me about something you've achieved
Upon reading this question, two answers immediately came to mind:
I have ADHD, and while it has many positive aspects, one of the negative ones was difficulty reading and writing. It took a lot of work to overcome it in Hebrew (today I'm addicted to the written word). but in the world today it is very difficult to "survive" without knowing to read and write well aspecialy in English…  As I’m writing this I understand that recently I rather mastered this second language (as such), and even though it takes forever to answer each question, it’s still an achievement :)

The other achievement is the ability to make a living from something that interests me and that I love doing.
What’s your ideal working day
I rarely have an ideal working day, but my fantasy working day is one that has a number of hours devoted to painting and a number of hours devoted to working on the dolls in my workshop, and also leave me enough time to visit the sea, Time to be with my loved ones, do something spontaneous – the list goes on (as does this imagined day). Meanwhile, I'm satisfied if I manage to achieve half of what I aimed for in my list of tasks.
Who influences you creatively
It’s difficult to answer who influenced my creativity because so many people inspire me and so many things stimulate my eyes, that I do not exactly know… But I think that my mother (who is a carpenter and a most creative person,www.studiopaam.co.il/) sure has paved the way first (from infancy). She taught me not to fear any material or any creative idea. With that knowledge as my starting point, all is possible and inspiring
Are you usually late, early or right on time
I'm always early (for many hours of my life I stood in front of closed doors). Even when I try to arrive fashionably late, I fail (it’s something in the genes)

How do you start a new piece of work?
New projects always start from the material. It is the materials that stimulate the need to play with them and assemble them into something new. Besides that I haven’t established a routine. Each project and/or new design asks for somewhere different from me and from my work environment.
Where would you like to go in the world for inspiration
The truth is that anywhere in the world intrigues and inspires me, because any place has its own qualities, but if I must choose, then something from wild nature to metropolitan area in the far East

What piece of work are you most proud of
Right now I'm pleased of my "Family dolls" line, because they are different characters that can be put together as families.  They come in all skin tones and all ages and genders, so that people can assemble any family they please. I really like to see how they are being bought for every family model that you can possibly think of (two men and a baby, a single mom and twins, a family that consists of a grandmother, a brother and a sister, or of a father dark-skinned Chinese mother and three children, and sometimes even simply a “common” family with uncles, neighbors and a dog.) sometimes people write me asking for very special families, and it’s a delight to see what a variety of shapes and colors there are for love in the reality of a modern family.
What would you like to develop further or learn to do
I want to develop all sorts of things, perhaps more toward art and less toward the craft (even though it's a very fine line). I want to do more of the developing and designing and less of the producing.
I guess I still have a lot to learn about balancing creativity, income, values and quality.
I would also love to learn printing techniques and how to drive a scooter, study Arabic, and the list goes on…

What's your favourite food, music, movie or book
I love a huge variety of all (from classics to the highly esoteric).

Who do you think I should interview next
There are lots of talented artists that I’d love for you to interview, and I chose someone I do not actually know: I came across her in ETSY and immediately fell in love with her creations and her abstract way of thinking.
Aplusdesignn

Timor's links:
Site: www.timo-handmade.com/
Shop: http://www.etsy.com/shop/timor?ref=pr_shop
F.B: www.facebook.com/timohandmade

Thanks so much Timor and I wish you health, wealth and happiness in all your ventures!

3 September 2011

Etienne Cliquet

Flotilla
You have to go and watch this!  I'm not so technical that I can put the video on my blog but I do have the link!  Since 2004, Etienne's research has focused onto the practice of origami and the technologies. He tries to develop an analogy between the fragility of folding, the versatility of Internet and the precariousness of our work and life in the contemporary world. I just love it!  flotilla


Crowdfunder Clay.Coven Ceramics

Just a few more days to go to achieve their dream of bringing the creativity of clay to the local community. And as my lovely friend Tash sa...