Ten unusual places to find art

Art in unusual places

1.  An Asian restaurant
Wallpaper by Debbie Plaskett (from near Bury St Edmunds)
Spotted at the (now defunct) Dojo Noodle Bar (Cambridge).




2.  A café.
Mural spotted at the Box Café on Norfolk Street (Cambridge).




3.  A bookstore shop window.
Justin Rowe's book sculptures, seen every advent time (and beyond) in the Cambridge University Bookshop.  Read my blog post.




4.  An airforce museum.
Seen at Duxford Air Museum (near Cambridge).  Read my blog post.




5.  A natural history museum
Discovered at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences (Cambridge).  Read my blog post.




6.  A hotel
Spotted at the Doubletree by Hilton Hotel, on the river Cam.  Read my blog post.




7.  A swimming pool
The Diver, by Esther Melamed.
Found at Parkside Pool (Cambridge).





8. An airport
Secret Forest Trails, by Nelda Karklina
Stumbled upon a few years ago at Luton Airport.  Read my blog post.




9. A hospital
Jim Anderson's mosaic at Addenbrooke's Hospital (Cambridge). Read my blog post.




10. A round-about
Newmarket Road! (Cambridge)  Read my blog post.





Not so unusual:

Finally, you might think that libraries were unusual places for art.  Books? Yes.  Art?  Not so much.

But I learned, during my blog quest to find art in Arbury, that this is not so.  Libraries are, in fact, excellent places to find art, and it's not at all unusual to happen upon a sculpture or a wall relief in a library.  Still, though, I wanted to append these pictures at the end of my 'unusual places' list.

Some art I've come across in Cambridge libraries:

Book art at the Central Public Library in the Grand Arcade.  Read my blog post.




From Audubon's book of birds.  Seen at the Cambridge University Library and blogged about here.

Owl sculpture in Arbury Public Library.  Read about it here.

Varallo, by Samuel Butler.  Seen at an exhibition at St John's College Library in 2013.

Have you come across some art in an unusual place?

And if so, where??  Let me know in comments.

Happy Easter Saturday! or, The Harrowing of Hell

Have you ever wondered what Jesus Christ was doing in between his death on the cross (Good Friday) and his resurrection (Easter  Sunday)?

Well, he was down in hell.  Rescuing some of the worthy souls trapped down there and taking them straight to Heaven.  Eve, Abraham and Adam were all included.

This is called the Harrowing of Hell (or anastasis in Greek - I just love that word).

The Harrowing of Hell.  Manuscript illumination, from f.54r of MS K.21,
Canticles, Hymns and Passion of St Christ, late 13th/early 14th C.
Source:  Collection of St John's College Library, Cambridge

I'm not 100% sure of the iconography but it looks to me as if Christ is standing on the instruments of his torture (planks from the cross).  I don't know what the symbols on the planks stand for.  He's wrapped his red funeral shroud around himself, or that's what it looks like as he's not fully clothed.  And he's stabbing the Devil's mouth with a long spear-like thing which looks more like a shaft of light than anything physical.

Three souls (the middle one is surely Eve) come huddling out through the Gate of Hell.  I like the way Hell has turreted architecture.  And I love the way the naked humans are walking barefoot on the Devi's teeth.

Satan is angry red (but a different, more orangey red from the regal red of Christ's robe).  The eyes are big and bulging, as are those of a beak-nosed sub-demon baring his teeth at the divine intruder.  Two tiny comic-looking devils cavort in the background:  the blue horned one looks a bit like a cow, and the bat-winged one blowing his little trumpet seems to have jumped out of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are.

Four more souls crowd together in Satan's maw.  One of them holds his face in his palm.  Their eyebrows and downturned mouths express desperate misery.  Are they among those about to be saved?  Or are their sins too great?

I like the ocular intimacy (a phrase I borrow from Mika Natif in her chapter in this brilliant book that I'm reading at the moment) between Christ and the foremost human (Adam?).  The anatomical detail is also great:  breast bones, clavicles, rib cages, diaphragms, calf muscles -- all carefully delineated.

Have a peaceful and happy Easter, everyone!


If you'd like to read more:
St John's College Library, mediaeval manuscripts

Icons and their interpretation: The Khora anastasis (great analysis of a brilliant Byzantine Harrowing fresco in the Kariye Cami in Istanbul)

Eat the bible (a sceptic's view)

Three works from Sub-ti-tled, a Changing Spaces exhibition

We keep seeing exhibitions 'pop up' in abandoned shop fronts and empty stores around Cambridge.  They're organised by Changing Spaces, and their latest show is Sub-ti-tled at 6-16 King Street -- some of you may remember this as the Wallace King furniture shop.

The carpets and parquet flooring of the furniture store are still in evidence, and one living room-style displays recalls the ghosts of former retail.


View of gallery with Melina Juergens' photography among furniture, and Issam Kourbaj's work.

Issam Kourbaj

Issam Kourbaj, Farewell My City of Joy, 2003

Hanging right next to the shop window is Issam Kourbaj's strange work.  At first sight, it looks like an abstract painting, made up of painted rectangles.

But it isn't.  It's made up of bits of books.



Book covers made of marbled cardboard, book covers torn from their volumes, embossed book covers, book covers encrusted with pigment.







In between, there are also book pages, their printed lines of text struggling to remain visible beneath splotches of paint.



And just because we tend to photograph such works from the front which makes them seem flatter (and more 'painting-like') than they really are:  here are some angled views.  See the materiality.  See the depth of the supporting canvas.  See what the foreshortened view does to perception.







Issam Kourbaj is artist-in-residence at Christ's College, and Anne-Claire Morel is one of Christ's Visual Arts' Scholars.  Here are details from her exhibited work:

Anne-Claire Morel

Anne-Claire Morel, Almighty Me, 2013, plaster and clay

These tiny heads remind me of Anthony Gormley's sculpture installation Field.

Mark Box

Photographer Mark Box shows a sample of his large-scale portrait photographs:  floating heads starkly outlined against white backgrounds.  I met Mark in the exhibition, and he told me that the Movember photos took 230 hours to make, from start to finish.


Mark Box, Movember I, 2012, digital giclée print


View of Gallery 616, King Street, with Mark Box's photographs, Lynne Brown's  pastel works on paper, and Issam Kourbaj's assemblage

Sub-ti-tled

11 artists in total are showing at the exhibition.  Four of them are Christ's Visual Arts Scholars -- a fantastic initiative within Christ's College!  They have their studios above 1-16 King Street.

Read one art-history student's thoughtful comments on the exhibition:  Review by Robert Hawkins in Varsity.

Rob Hawkins writes:  "Of course, the difference between making art at Cambridge and making it in an art school is the lacking sense of immersion, of constant criticism and subsequent improvement."

What Hawkins perhaps doesn't know is that Cambridge does actually have a thriving art school:  the Cambridge School of Art.  In fact, two Cambridge School of Art graduates are involved with Sub-ti-tled:  Mark Box (exhibiting his photography) and Anji Main (curator of the show and also director of Changing Spaces).  Both are, I'm proud to say, former students of mine.  :-)

Check out Cambridge School of Art exhibitions at my pinterest board!

Last chance to see it!!  The exhibition ends on Sunday, 24 Feb.

Related posts:

Book art in Cambridge 

Alison Litherland's cows  (another Changing Spaces exhibition)

Permalink:  http://artincambridge.blogspot.com/2013/02/three-works-from-sub-ti-tled-changing.html 

Book art in the library

Cambridge's Central Library has a café on the second floor with windows that overlook the shoppers milling about the mall of the Grand Arcade.  And it was here that I spotted this work of art.




Books fly across three panels like birds, embedded in a white sky of thickly impastoed paint.  Others swim in a deep blue mass of compacted pages and spines.




It's half-way between a 3-D sculpture and a 2-D painting:  it's a kind of book relief.





The books are real books. They have been painted, cut, glued, ripped, propped, defaced, rammed and generally 'made strange'.  Thick cracked paint drips onto them.

We're not used to seeing books as 'mere' objects:  paper and cardboard pulp. Most of us may quail at throwing a book in the bin or using a book to light a fire -- even if it's a book we hate.




But here, books are reduced to material objects. 

Or are they revealed as what they in fact are?  Blocks of rectangular paper with black lines of print, bound together by linen or cardboard?

They remind me of my favourite novel, Italo Calvino's postmodern If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (1979; original Italian title: Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore). 

In Chapter 7, one of the characters (Irnerio who never reads books) explains that he makes sculptures out of books:

Faccio delle cose coi libri. Degli oggetti. Sí, delle opere: statue, quadri, come li vuoi chiamare. Ho fatto anche un'esposizione. Fisso i libri con delle resine, e restano lí. Chiusi, o aperti, oppure anche gli do delle forme, li scolpisco, gli apro dentro dei buchi. È una bella materia il libro, per lavorarci, ci si può fare tante cose.

Here's my translation:

I make things with books. Objects. Yes, works: statues, pictures, whatever you want to call them. I've even had an exhibition. I fix the books with resin, and they stay there. Closed, or open, or I may even give them shapes, I carve them, I open up holes in them. It's a beautiful material, the book, to work with, one can do so many things with it.

Does your local library contain any art?  Have a look.  You might be surprised -- I was!

What and who:  The plaque next to the work informs us that this is Flight of Imagination, created "by young Cambridgeshire artist Aaron Lewis especially for Cambridge library cafe. It was produced using only salvaged books."

(I don't know what a salvaged book is.  Is this sentence supposed to make us feel better?  As in:  no books were harmed in the making of this art.)

Where:  Central Library, Grand Arcade, Cambridge.


Related post:
Justin Rowe's magical book sculptures

Permalink: http://artincambridge.blogspot.com/2013/02/book-art-in-library.html

Justin Rowe's magical book sculptures in the CUP Bookshop

Justin Rowe, Midwinter Bookscape, book sculpture, Cambridge University Bookshop

I was on my way home last week when I was brought up short by the book sculpture in the window of the Cambridge University bookshop.



You may say: why not come back and take proper photos in the daytime?  But in a way these filigree shapes look even better at night, especially as they are lit from inside, like some fairy-tale nativity scene.






I didn't have my camera with me but I whipped out my new mobile phone for instant pics.  I apologise for the grainy quality!



You can just about see them twinkling in the window at left.

Who?  Justin Rowe 

What?  Midwinter Bookscape, third book display for the CUP Bookshop advent season (he also did displays in 2011 and 2010).  A sculpture made out of books.

More:

Crystal-sharp photos of the sculpture in Justin Rowe's blog

Book sculptures by other artists

Permalink:  http://artincambridge.blogspot.com/2012/12/justin-rowes-magical-book-sculptures-in.html