Hasta La Ideas

Eight standouts from the annual graduate show

Each year the Royal College of Art degree show highlights some of the brightest emerging design talent across a variety of disciplines. London’s RCA prides itself on its international reputation, attracting creative minds from all over the world to learn from its renowned professors and industry experts. From textiles to vehicle design, we always look forward to the annual output of innovative and inspiring works.

Below are eight projects culled from this year’s RCA Degree Show on view at the college’s Kensington Building, selected for their aesthetic beauty, innovative use of materials and inherently tactile nature.

Kaori Takasu

Kaori Takasu graduated from the Textiles Platform without a piece of fabric or thread in sight, but instead an installation of printed blocks, both wall-mounted and set up on a table like a complex set of dominoes. These colourful installations were, according to Takasu, inspired by a trip to Detroit, “where abandoned buildings, homes, streets stood still ghostly against nature’s movement.” We love the boldness of Kaori’s designs, which she describes as blocks that build up “to form a bigger pattern together, like a cityscape.”

Alei Verspoor

At the more practical end of the textiles spectrum is Alei Verspoor‘s “Pack!”—a modular system for self-assembled travel bags that also function as storage or seating. Verspoor’s work focuses on the discipline of “Design for Disassembly,” with each of the Pack elements made out of a single material, which, as he explains, “makes it easy to replace and recycle components.” Alei describes Pack as a pattern in how it’s constructed. Through “the weaving and folding and assembling of differently colored and printed components, three-dimensional check patterns are created, that continue to evolve over time, as components are replaced or added,” he says.

Tamsin Van Essen

We wrote about Van Essen‘s work back in 2008 when she exhibited at Designers Block as part of the London Design Festival. Now this talented ceramic designer has graduated from the RCA with a project entitled “Vanitas Vanitatum—a garniture of beauty and decay.” This collection of ornate crumbling vases is inspired by the beauty and decay seen in Dutch “vanities” paintings and in Dickens’ descriptions of Miss Havisham’s Satis House. Tamsin says of the work, “I aim to capture the fragile moment when abundance turns to decay. Frozen in time just at the point of disintegration, the vases represent an ornamental memento mori.”

Zemer Peled

We were impressed by the scale and drama of Zemer Peled‘s ceramic installations, which appeared to grow out of the ground and the ceiling like earthen stalactites and stalagmites. The collection of sculptural forms entitled “I am walking in a forest of shards” is accompanied by the text, “I went to see the dead forest; it was the most beautiful, quiet and peaceful place I have ever been. Silence. No sound of animals, or wind blowing on the trees, no evidence left of the catastrophe that happened there only a few weeks earlier. I was walking alone a forest of black naked trees.” There is a wonderful sense of storytelling in these mysterious organic forms made out of thousands of ceramic shards assembled from smashed black and white fired clay. Zemer describes her work as “creating new life out of the chaos of broken fragments.”

Sissel Wathne

After the poetic drama of Van Essen and Peled the practical comfort of Sissel Wathne‘s ceramic designs offer a pleasant contrast. A collection of objects called “Hygge—Nordic tools for everyday living” 
offers a beautiful interaction with daily objects. The cups and bowls ask to be held through the curvature of their form, especially the handles, which “embrace the hand” as Sissel says. She describes her designs as an “invitation to use,” and in Danish “hygge” means comfortable, cosy, homely and friendly.

Jack Wates

Over on the Architecture Platform a freestanding bathtub caught our attention and with it Jack Wates‘ project “The Hackney Bathhouse.” Inspired by the British weather, Jack imagines a building constructed with water as a “complex living architectural material.” Through a process of distillation and condensation, taken from the Combined Cooling Heating & Power (CCHP) technology in the adjacent Olympic Energy Center, the water not only heats and cools this “palace of sensation,” but also cleans up its water source, the polluted River Lea.

Polyfloss

The RCA’s IDE Platform stands for Innovation Design Engineering and directs students towards practical solutions for contemporary global issues. The “Polyfloss Factory” is a prime example of how IDE works, which is a collective project involving four students, Audrey Gaulard, Emile De Visscher, Christophe Machet and Nicholas Paget
, who have designed a new system for recycling plastic. Their micro-factory process allows any “skilled maker to create high-value objects from a free material.” The colorful “Polyfloss”—made from waste polypropolene—has a candy floss-type texture and can be used to make anything from headphones to vases. What’s more, the “Polyfloss Factory” is a closed loop system, meaning any product can be put back in the machine and made into something new again.

Eunhee Jo

Also in IDE, conforming to the ongoing theme of tactility around the RCA Show, was Eunhee Jo‘s “New Tangible Interfaces” project, which stood out for its minimal design and soft approach to technology. Eunhee has designed a new sound system, TTI (Tangible Textural Interface), that’s covered in a soft silky textile. The system is controlled by swiping finger movements across the surface in much the same way as we currently use smartphones. Eunhee describes her product as redefining the role of surfaces in future lifestyles, to create “physical sensorial experiences, both delightful and functional.”


Réalisée par JC Pieri pour le magazine « Art BMX », cette vidéo tournée à Paris donne une superbe image du BMX dans la capitale française. Mettant en scène Alain Massabova effectuant des figures dans des lieux importants de la ville, cette séquence mélangeant ambiance et performance est à découvrir dans la suite.

With an identity designed by Music, supporting portrait photography by Paul Moffat and great imagery on show, there are a number of reasons to flag up group forthcoming art exhibition Heart & Sold here on the CR blog…

Heart & Sold is a forthcoming exhibition organised by Suzie Moffat to promote a group of talented artists with Down Syndrome. The show’s identity centres on a brass picture hook which features a cut out heart. The hooks on the invites were actually pin badges for people to wear to the show (above).

The exhibition’s newsprint brochure is also great (cover shown above, spreads below), not least for it’s super portrait photography of the 12 contributing artists in the show, all but two of which are by Paul Moffat.

Looking through the brochure not having seen the show which ran for a week in late June at The Mulberry Tree Café in the Heritage Centre in Macclesfield (and which will run in the same venue again from August 21-26), I felt it was a shame that the images of artists (great as they are) are the main focus – I’d love to have seen some of the artwork bigger than the thumbnails shown over just two spreads in the brochure.

However, photographer Moffat sent me some shots of the work on the walls of the venue as well as digital files of his portraits of the artists responsible which gave me the opportunity to see the work. I thought I’d take the opportunity, here on the blog, to share the experience and marry up some images of art and artist from the project – which of course is what visitors to the show will be able to do as they stroll around the exhibition armed with a copy of the brochure.

The above two photographs are by David Kenward who was shot at home by Moffat for the brochure:

The two illustrations above are from a series of line drawings exhibited by Lester Magoogan (below)

Fiona Stevenson (below) has various jewellery creations such as the Crown Brooch and Bead Necklace (above) on show, as well as a series of oil paintings

And these acrylic landscape paintings are by Tazia Fawley (below)

While Heart & Sold will be exhibited next month from August 21-26 at the Mulberry Tree Café at the Heritage Centre in Macclesfield, organiser Suzie Moffat is very much hoping to get the required support to tour the exhibition around the UK.

“We want to give artists with Down Syndrome, their friends and family an opportunity to use Heart & Sold as a platform, to create, educate, inspire, sell, encourage on an ever increasing scale, and prove that art is from the heart and should have no bearing on condition,” she says.

To find out more about the project, buy any of the artworks, or to potentially get involved with future Heart & Sold shows in your area, visit heartandsold.org.uk.

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Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled A-E” (1975)

Sure, it’s only July, but we’re already predicting this year’s hottest Halloween costume: Cindy Sherman. The chameleon-like artist’s recent Museum of Modern Art retrospective apparently attracted a bold impersonator who chatted up visitors in the guise—well, a guise—of Sherman. The bold soul chanced upon This American Life host Ira Glass, who was checking out the show with his friend Etgar Keret, the Israeli writer and filmmaker (whose own compact narratives, you may recall, inspired that wee Warsaw house designed by Jakub Szczesny). Simultaneously flummoxed and delighted by the encounter, Glass and Keret told the story at the top of a recent This American Life broadcast on the topic “Switcheroo.”

“If I had to describe her, I’d say that she looked like she was about 55 or 60, wire rim glasses, gray hair,” says Glass of the woman who approached them at the exhibit and introduced herself as Sherman. “Looking at her, thinking that she might be Cindy Sherman, I thought if you were to try to put on a costume to exactly blend in with the crowd at the Museum of Modern Art, this is the costume.” They chatted with her, but eventually she changed her story and insisted that she was not the artist after all. The plot thickens. “Later I thought to myself that if I would pretend to be Cindy Sherman, the last thing I would do would be to tell people I’m not Cindy Sherman,” says Keret. “I would be too embarrassed to say in the end I’m not Cindy Sherman. So I kind of thought in the end, like after she had left, that she probably was Cindy Sherman.”
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

• Madcap madras meets spaceman chic in an elegant Parisian garden? Only Thom Browne could pull off that improbable combination and garnish it with giant silver Slinkys (“spring has spring”), from which his glimmering models emerged in a rainbow of exploded prepster motifs (watch a video of the presentation here). Providing a spectacular close to the spring 2013 menswear shows marked the start of a busy July for Browne, who heads to the White House Friday to join the other 2012 National Design Award recipients for a luncheon hosted by First Lady Michelle Obama. Here’s hoping that Browne dons a sample from his latest collection for the festivities (might we suggest look #18, at right?).

• In other National Design Awards news, the Cooper-Hewitt has selected this year’s Design Patron: Red Burns, an arts professor and chief collaborations officer for the interactive telecommunications program at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She is being recognized for her role as founder of ITP and for her innovations and achievements in the field of communication technology, the museum announced yesterday. During the 1970s, as head of NYU’s Alternate Media Center, she designed and directed a series of telecommunications projects, including two-way television for and by senior citizens, telecommunications applications to serve the developmentally disabled, and one of the first Teletext field trials in the United States (at WETA in Washington, D.C.).
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.