England Art And Culture

Leeds Student Union abandon plans to open a petting zoo for exam-stressed students; instead they are hiring a bouncy castle. In my day student stress was coped with by having lots of alcohol and sex ... how times have changed! Paul Thomas has the story.

TV A guest post from writer Mags L Halliday: Survival should, probably, have been my last Doctor Who story. It was 1989 and I was at art college, living in a bedsit on a diet of jacket potatoes, and going to see American post-punk bands. My tv was a tiny black and white set with a hoop aerial and a dial you used to tune in manually. Presuming you'd put a 50p in the meter. Once a week, though, I'd head back to my parents for a real dinner and Doctor Who in colour. I missed the first episode of season 26 in fact. Unsurprisingly arty shared houses did not buy tv listings magazines so I only realised after it was on. And my parents didn't have a video. By the time Survival aired, it felt like it was becoming time to put Who away in the box marked "childhood". Despite the season having contained two of my favourite stories, Ghost Light and The Curse of Fenric, things like Hale and Pace and bad animatronic cats made me embarrassed. Thematically, Survival is about conforming (or not) and working together to escape a doomed world (be that Perivale or the Cheetah planet). That chimed with me, as I partied with Anti-Fascist League members and protested the oncoming poll tax. In retrospect, Survival distilled the social and political tensions of the late 80s every bit as much as the more obvious The Happiness Patrol. But still... Most fans think Survival has a melancholy air applied only afterwards, just as the Doctor's voice over at the end was dubbed on in edit. But for me that feeling was there as I watched it, and it chimed with my own feeling that something was coming to an end. Had there been another season in 1990, I suspect I wouldn't have watched it. My love of Who would have been boxed away along with my Bauhaus t-shirt. Instead, I bought the first New Adventure. And Doctor Who became too broad and too deep for any TV set. Mags is a contributor to Chicks Unravel Time: Women Journey Through Every Season of Doctor Who and Encounters of Sherlock Holmes: Brand new tales of the Great Detective, both out now. Her previous works include the Eighth Doctor novel History 101 (which I reviewed here) as well as for the Professor Bernice Summerfield and Faction Paradox spin-off ranges.

Wood Festival by Ben Rothery Illustrator. This year I was soooo looking forward to camping with our baby Snarfle at Wood Festival, my favourite family friendly small music festival in the whole world. Sadly it was not to be. The gremlin that is teething reared it’s ugly head in dramatic fashion a few days before the festival, and I couldn’t bear the thought of dealing with incessant nighttime screaming as our induction into camping as a family: not to mention how unfair it would be to everyone around us. You know that baby that keeps you up all night on a campsite? Yup, that would have been us. So we decided to cut our losses and drive up for a day of festival time on Saturday. Wood Festival does everything with a big hearted ethos of responsibility: just check out the wonderful pricing system for parking fees at Braziers Park. Fortunately we are now three so I don’t feel so bad about our choice of transport! We had been worried about the weather but a grey start soon gave way to a sometimes blustery but often sunny day: perfect for camping as we dolefully noted a few times. Still, we’d made our decision, and arrived tent less. This year the kids’ tent was hosted by Barefoot Books, a perfect fit for Wood Festival since they also host a cafe and community space at their main UK offices in Oxford. The friendly space featured a book stand (naturally) and plenty of areas for babies and children of all ages to hang out and play. We attended a singing session and a puppet show put on by a children’s theatre company. There was also a book signing session, and for older kids an iFOUNDSOUND workshop with musician Dan Mayfield, where old 7 inch records were given a new lease of life as a homemade miniature record player – constructed out of cardboard, coins, a needle and goggly eyes. Yes really. There were events going on all day in a plethora of tents and casually marked out spaces on the grass: too many to list here, and too many to attend with an irritable baby, though we did try the spoons workshop (he wasn’t feeling that, but then he wasn’t feeling much to be honest, CURSED TEETH). So instead we tanked up on delicious seasonal local organic food from Vaults & Garden and lazed about on the grass listening to music. Here’s a selection of what we heard: Click here to view the embedded video. Adam Barnes is the King of Sunshine and Rainbows according to his twitter bio, but was quick to apologise for the downbeat nature of most of his songs. We enjoyed his beautiful voice and tales of woe, accompanied by only the lightest of guitar strums and keys. Click here to view the embedded video. House of Hats hail from Brighton, with wonderful folk harmonies shared between the female lead vocalist and her male cohorts: the perfect thing for a relaxed festival setting. I love the artwork that accompanies their free download, why not check it out? Flights of Helios wooed me with their woozy tunes; moody synth sounds topped off with yet another gorgeous male voice. I can’t wait to hear more from these Oxford based boys. Click here to view the embedded video. In the Tree Tent I stumbled on the delicious voice of singer songwriter Liz Lawrence, who had a rapt audience hooked on her lilting tunes. It was great to hear Co-Pilgrim play live: I’m a big fan of their beguiling take on Americana – you can read more in my review of their new album here. Oxford is a hot bed of creativity, and the more I discover about the wonders of this little town the more I think, hmmmm, what a nice place to live that would be. In the meantime I’ll have to content myself with the wonders of Wood Festival: the most delightful small music festival that ever there was. Why not make it your destination next year? The quality of music is always awesome, and there’s no other place I’d rather take a small baby. We look forward to a more successful vi

"We went out to lunch and we started talking about dresses, he told me I should wear this one, and I said ok, and then I wore it."

Elements of the Fish Bone chapel being 3D printed If you're an artist or designer interested in applying your creative skills to life sciences, chances are that you've heard about Designers & Artists 4 Genomics Awards, an international competition that invites artists and designers to submit proposals to a jury of experts and develop them in close collaboration with The Netherlands most prestigious Life Sciences research institutes. The outcome of the competition range from the outrageously bold (the now famous bulletproof skin) to the ambitiously eco-friendly. The winners of this year's edition of the competition are Charlotte Jarvis who recently talked to me about her Ergo Sum project, Howard Boland and Laura Cinti with The Living Mirror (more about this one soon, i hope) and Haseeb Ahmed who is planning to digitally fabricate a Fish Bone Chapel. The artist is teaming up with the Netherlands Toxico-Genomics Center and Prof. Jos Kleinjans to build an architectural structure which, as its name suggests, will be made of fish bones. The vertebrae vaults, scaled walls and beating circulation systems of this architecture are derived from enlarged 3D prints and the skeletal structure of fish exposed to mutagenic toxins. Haseeb is working with the zebra fish, an animal often used for genetic testing as it is technically not considered to be animals for the first 5 days of their life Ultimately however, the work also asks whether we can see past the dangerous connotations of mutation and regard it as a medium to generate new forms. Zebra Fish altered exposed to toxins Elements of the Fish Bone chapel being 3D printed The more i read about the project, the more curious i grew so i contacted Hasseb Ahmed who patiently answered my many questions: The Fish Bone Chapel draws a historical connection with the Capuchin Crypt located beneath the church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini in Rome. The crypt is decorated with the skeletal remains of 4,000 bodies believed to be Capuchin friars buried by their order, as a silent reminder of our own mortality. Hi Haseeb! Your project, The Fish Bone Chapel, 'is a hybrid building, existing of fish bones.' I'm sorry but i'll have to start with the most mundane question because i imagine a chapel to be rather big and i suspect your final prototype might not rise to ambitious heights. So how tall, how big can the chapel be? And will it adopt a shape that people associate with the one of a chapel? The Fish Bone Chapel is indeed the scale of a building. The goal has always been to create a spatial experience in which one can literally inhabit genomics research and in particular the mutations in Zebra Fish skeletons induced by exposure to toxins from embryo to adult. My work will be sited in the atrium of the the current depot of the Naturalis Museum and former Royal Museum for Natural History built in the early 1900's. This atrium already has a kind of pseudo-Dutch Protestant religious architecture complete with niches, vaulted ceilings, and chandeliers. However, instead of religious iconography it features iguanas, snails, and fish. My aim is to create works that build onto this architecture with arches of my own, ornaments, and chandeliers so that the space appears as though it was made to host the Fish Bone Chapel all along. My reference is the Capucine Bone Chapels of Southern Italy which use the bones of former Monks to construct architectural features. In my case it's Fish not Brothers. That was one concept of Life and Death given by Catholocism and I want to address the new intermediate stages of life and death brought about by Genomics research and its legal apparatus. Interesting enough the central 'altar piece' is at the base of a stairwell often drawn by M.C. Escher in his labyrinthine works and I will play up on this as well. The description of the project also mentions beating circulation systems which makes me think that the work will have some kind of life

VANTAGE are back with another art prize! This time three winners are awarded a group residency in London (venue TBC) with free accommodation, £250 expenses and an exhibition plus a publication. Deadline for applications 31st May.

The extent to which great composers can be blind to the failings of bad libretti is a constant source of fascination, not to say entertainment. And I’ve just been hugely entertained by a performance of Handel’s oratorio Joseph and his Brethren at the Gottingen Handel Festspiele in central Germany. If you don’t know Joseph you [...]

If like me, you are a Pinterest fan, you no doubt spend more happy hours avidly collecting crafting ideas than actually creating them. Which is why the concept of Pinterest Parties have become all the rage in America, where crafting fanatics can meet up to bring their Pinterest lusts to life in the real world. Over here in lil old London Sarah and Plum (above) are the two enterprising ladies behind Pinned it! Made it! Pinterest Parties, held in Hackney Downs Studios. I of course jumped at the chance to attend one of their events, where I could learn how to make my very own Day of the Dead style floral headband, ideal garb for festival goers this season. You can find all the aforementioned Pinterest inspiration for these floral crowns on the Pinned it! Made it! board here. After a yummy Ilegal Mezcal cocktail (served up a jam jar by Qui Qui Ri Qui) we were given a brief demo by Marianne Johnson of Wild by Nature, a florist of some 15 years. She inducted us into the sticky ways of florist tape, a wonderful thing that enables spiky bits of wire to be glued together into one smooth mass. We were then directed to a table heaving with a colourful selection of fake flowers, and it was heads down all round, as we set about creating our floral crowns. As they began to take shape it became apparent that we were all creating very individual looks, and that is surely one of the best things about making something yourself: yes, you probably could buy something like this off the peg, but my creation will never look like yours. And I like that feeling! At the end Anna Wild gave us a brief demonstration of how to create full on Day of the Dead make up. I’m not really the type to dress up all crazee for festivals, but in a light bulb moment I realised that I’m now sorted to go as Frida Kahlo to a big fancy dress party I have been worrying about. All I need for that is copious quantities of eyebrow pencil. The Pinned it! Made it! ladies post all their events onto facebook, and of course, onto Pinterest. You can also find upcoming events on eventbrite. Find what tickles your creative fancy and then get your craft on by signing up for a Pinned it! Made it! party soon – the next one on June 18th will be blinging up sunglasses, inspiration here. It was a fab way to spend an otherwise ordinary weekday evening: I’ll leave you with some of the fab creations that the girls at my table made.

Horology The Financial Times reports that Omega watches are introducing a new innovation to their watch movements: "After increases in recent times engendered by the introduction of new technologies such as the coaxial escapement and the silicon hairspring, the company’s latest innovation, a movement that is antimagnetic to a greater degree than has previously been achieved, will continue the pattern. "The movement, based on Omega’s calibre 8500, its first proprietary coaxial movement, incorporates non-ferrous materials throughout to negate magnetic interference." Essentially this is a watch which can be worn around things like MRI scanners without fault.

I've been posting on an irregular basis recently due to the need to keep giving my eyes a lengthy rest because I'm at the "inbetween stage" with respect to my surgery for cataracts. My new lens... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]