Mathematics is the foundation of activities such as knitting, stitching, measuring and cutting that are crucial to crafting and fabrication
The exhibition "Beauty is the First Test" runs form 27 April - 30 June 2013 at The National Centre for Craft & Design, Navigation Wharf, Carre Street, Sleaford, Lincolnshire NG34, UK.
"The group show explores how mathematical concepts underpin craft techniques, aiming to 'demystify a subject that intimates both adults and children', according to the centre. The exhibition demonstrates how mathematics is the foundation of activities such as knitting, stitching, measuring and cutting that are crucial to crafting and fabrication. Showcasing works in disciplines including textiles and sculpture, the show will feature work from artists including Michael Brennand-Wood, Janice Gunner, Lucy McMullen and Ann Sutton.
Alongside the visual proof that maths can indeed be fun - and pretty - the exhibition also presents case studies of five makers, including Gail Baxter and Margo Selby, exploring how the development of their work was furthered by an understanding and appreciation of mathematics."
(Emily Gosling, 27 March 2013, Design Week)
Fig.1 Janette Matthews, "Optical Ellipse". Fig.2 Ann Sutton, "Four Ways from a Square", 2009.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Op Hop/Hop Op by Pierre Hébert
"Ročno izdelan eksperiment z utripajočo animacijo v slogu praskanke na filmski trak. Prikazuje skupino štiriindvajsetih abstrahiranih podob, ki se na zaslonu razporejajo in prerazporejajo v različnih kombinacijah. Rezultat je spreminjajoč se vzorec zvoka in slike, ki ima za oko in uho drugačen ritem.
A hand-made, scratched-on film experiment in intermittent animation. The images are a group of twenty-four visuals, all non-representational, which arrange and rearrange on the screen in many combinations. The result is a changing pattern of sound and image that has its own rhythm for eye and ear. "
(Animateka International Animation Film Festival, Ljubljana, Slovenia)
Pierre Hébert (NFB), Kanada/Canada, 1966, 35 mm, 3'30''
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Chinoiserie at Lincolnshire's Belton House
"Hand painted C18th Chinese wallpaper at Belton in the Chinese Bedroom with a continuous scene of a garden party. Cornice, dado and other joinery painted to imitate bamboo."
(National Trust, UK)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Examples of Chinese ornament selected from objects in the South Kensington museum and other collections
"We have long been familiar with the power of the Chinese to balance colours, but we were not so well acquainted with their power of treating purely ornamental or conventional forms ; and in the chapter in the Grammar of Ornament on Chinese Ornament I was led, from my then knowledge, to express the opinion that the Chinese had not the power of dealing with conventional ornamental form : but it now appears that there has been a period in which a School of Art existed in China of a very important kind. We are led to think that this art must in some way have had a foreign origin; it so nearly resembles in all its principles the art of the Mohammedan races, that we may presume it was derived from them. It would be no difficult task to take a work of ornament of this class, and, by simply varying the colouring and correcting the drawing, convert it into an Indian or Persian composition. There is of course, in all these works, something essentially Chinese in the mode of rendering the idea, but the original idea is evidently Mohammedan. The Moors of the present day decorate their pottery under the same instinct, and follow the same laws as the Chinese obeyed in their beautiful enamelled vases. The Moorish artist takes a rudely-fashioned pot or other object, and by a marvellous instinct divides the surface of the object, 'by spots of colour, into triangles of proportionate area, according to the form and size of the object; these triangles are then crossed by others."
(Owen Jones, 1867)
Owen Jones (1867). "Examples of Chinese Ornament Selected from Objects in the South Kensington Museum and Other Collections: By Owen Jones. One Hundred Plates", S. & T. Gilbert, 4 Copthall Buildings, E.C. Back of the Bank of England.
CONTRIBUTOR
Guannan (cassie) DuSHARE
The Vorticists: a short-lived 20th century avant garde art movement
"The vorticists did not have many members; nor did the movement last long, because of unfortunate timing - it formed in 1914 as Europe hurtled towards war. By 1918 there was not much appetite for dogmatic groups such as theirs.
Nevertheless, the group holds an important place in 20th-century British art history.
'They were the first abstract modernist group in Britain,' said Stephens. 'It inevitably comes out of the revolution of cubism, but then, so does everything in the 20th century.'
They were part of a maelstrom of new, aggressive art 'ism' movements, not least the one practised by the Italian futurists, who were, in Lewis's eyes, the bad guys.
Stephens said: 'Unlike the futurists, who celebrate the energy of the machine and actual war as a purging force, the vorticists were engaged in more universal ideas of identity, time and movement in a philosophical sense.'"
(Mark Brown, 13 June 2011, The Guardian)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
