Foray Into Chromatic Zones

Tucked away, up the stairs by the entrance to the Hayward Gallery, South Bank Centre,

is the Hayward Project Space.

Currently Shelia Hicks is exhibiting her work there. Her Foray Into Chromatic Zones. A 'foray' into colour. In this exhibition I can't decide which meaning she's going for. An 'attempt' or a 'visit'? You get to do both, to visit and to try colour out for yourself.

She works with textiles, or 'supple materials' as she likes to call them.

These are pretty supple.

For 60 years Shelia Hicks has worked with fibres.

Producing fibre based calligraphy,

drawing with mohair on rice paper.

And weaving panels on small picture frame style looms,

 incorporating found materials from her travels.

She calls these 'minimes' and describes them as pages of her diary.
Having done weaving at art college,
I know that these are no quick reflections, jotting down thoughts at the end of each day.
Weaving takes a long time.

Before you start thinking, 'yeah, isn't weaving a bit 1970s, not particularly cutting edge?' Hicks was sought after by Modernist architects. In 1967 she was commissioned to make wall panels for the Ford Foundation building in New York. These are not them, but are modelled on replacements made in 2014.

The originals were 'damaged in situ'.

Having read that the building had a 12-storey glass atrium,

I'm guessing that the culprit was light.

Originally produced in the sixties, the design looks so old yet so new.

I say 'old' reservedly, they were first made the year I was born and I'm not old!

Shelia Hicks studied under Josef Albers, a master of colour, who taught about and wrote 'Interaction with Colour'. I've mentioned him before, here, more weaving, rugs at Somerset House, Form Through Colour.

In the Sunset Pavilion, part of the Hayward Project Space,
Hicks provides us with a room full of colour to play with,
in the form of 'bales of pigmented fibre'.

Invited to 'interact with and immerse ourselves in colour', it seemed rude not to.
How often do you go to an exhibition wearing just the right coat?

Me, preferring to be the other side of the camera, I give you,

'Blue'

and 'Red'.

I waited quite a while for that bus.

Shelia Hicks: Foray into Chromatic Zones

is on in the Hayward Gallery Project Space until 19th April 2015.

Details on the South Bank Centre website, here.

If you go, let me know how you get on in the Sunset Pavilion.

It was good fun playing with colour and cameras.

Grant Museum

Going to a museum in the school holidays means two things.

One, they're a lot busier, but

two, they put on special events.

Like at the Grant Museum in half term which put out a table of objects to touch.

The great thing about handling objects is that you get to turn things upside-down.

Very different from seeing them in glass cases.

Like the Horseshoe crab,

 a hedgehog.

 and a Dogfish.

Next time you get to touch a dried Dogfish, try running your fingers up and down the skin.

It is covered in tiny hooks a bit like velcro.

From head to tail, your fingers will run smoothly down the skin,

from tail to head, your fingers will get stuck on all the tiny hooks. We tried this, it worked.

Some things are a little too fragile to picked up, though but you can still get pretty close.

 For those of you that don't know, the Grant Museum is a zoological museum,
part of UCL, London.

We've been visiting regularly for a few years and love it.

Years ago in their old building the Giant Spider crab captured my son's imagination and on first visiting the new building, we had to check it was still there. It was.

There some truly weird and wonderful specimens.

Like the Surinam Toad whose babies burst out through her skin,

and this model of an elephant's heart, "bigger than my head".

Keeping with the elephant theme,
we were truly perplexed by this cast of an Elephant Bird egg on the left. 

So the egg to its right is an Ostrich egg and we know how tall Ostriches are, taller than me. I saw one in the Horniman recently, see it on my previous post, here.

"How tall must the Elephant Bird have been?"

Actually my friends language was a little more flowery than that, expressing sheer incredulity. You can see from our reflections how big the egg was. Sadly we'll never see the real bird for ourselves as they were hunted to extinction in Madagascar in the 1700s.

Back to more believable bird sizes, we chat about penguins.

"Even the eggs are so sweet."

Now what the Grant Museum has got that I have never seen anywhere else, is a collection of slides, 20,000 microscopic slides.

Where you can discover even more about Dogfish, their embryos,

and mice, embryo necks, the left sides.

We're not the first.

But it's a great opportunity for a #museumselfie.

We're not the only ones having a little fun with/in museums.
This jar of moles has its own Twitter account.
@GlassJarOfMoles

But watch your behaviour, surveillance measures have been put in place,

we're know we're being watched.

The Grant Museum is a real treasure.

Open Monday to Saturday, 1-5pm.

Details on their website, here.

Follow the @GlassJarOfMoles on their Twitter account, here.

Deptford: Local history

Local history is displayed in local places.

This is Deptford, South-East London,

more precisely Deptford Action Group for the Elderly, 

where an archive of local history is gradually being added to.

I don't think there's a plan, a strategy for this collection,

just a conviction and enthusiasm to make sure people and events are remembered.

Whilst the photos above might tell of childhood memories of life in Deptford,

there is much evidence of more recent history:

Like the Olympics, London, 2012,

friends, locals, who have passed on,

protesting,

trips to the seaside,

 and boxing.

I have had the wonderful opportunity to see all this

whilst hanging out with new friends with a cup of tea and a piece of cake.

Strictly I shouldn't be there at all,

I'm not put off by the no alcohol rule but I've yet to qualify as a pensioner.

I got to know these lovely people through a mutual friend, Rose Bird.

We all worked together.

In 2013 I ran a project called Deptford Decades where older people shared memories of Deptford and the 1940s & 50s, with local school children. The project ran for a few months, ending in a grande finale, a tea-dance in which the children performed dances they had choreographed themselves to tell the older people's stories. Over 120 people turned up. It was such good fun and also very moving at times. I remember that during one dance, the children all ducked down in quick unison, illustrating Barbara's memories of hiding under her kitchen table during an air raid.

We made a film too. It's about ten minutes long, it's beautiful.

You can hear first-hand from Barbara, Rose and others.

'Residents of Deptford tell their Stories'

You can find the link here.

I'm not advocating visiting DAGE, it's a drop-in centre for the local community of a certain age, there must be many places like this all over the country. However Deptford is brimming with history with associations to Peter the Great, Queen Elizabeth 1 and Christopher Marlowe.

There's quite a bit of history to see just walking back to the car park.

  Second World War air-raid shelter sign.

Deptford Docks established by Henry VIII

...a bit like a Chocolate Orange

The opportunity to get objects out of the cabinets in the Hands-on Base

in the Horniman Museum is irresistible to most visitors,

Kids and adults alike.

"Can I have a go with those wind instruments?"

Knowing that I couldn't let him, for health and safety reasons,

(imagine how many people would have put their lips to that flute, if we had let them)

I tried to distract him with these East African Thumb Pianos made with gourds.

They make a brilliant sound.

It didn't work, he wasn't interested,
"OK. Quite cool",

...not until this caught his eye, a shaker made from Brazil nuts.

The sound it made was really quite amazing,

surprisingly whooshy, "awesome" and not clinky.
He's impressed and having a good time.

I remember something and ask him, "Do you know how Brazil Nuts grow?"
We head over to another cabinet.

"In a pod, a bit like a Chocolate Orange."

As I said this, I remembered that I had a Chocolate Orange at home,

in the bottom of my wardrobe, an un-needed Christmas present.

He goes and gets his wife and daughter to show them too.

It seems to have captured their imagination.

I then send them off to the Natural History Gallery to check out the Agouti,

"the only creature apart from us, who can get into a Brazil Nut Pod".

I expect large teeth, but am surprised by the whiskers.

I love the blue background.

I think I'll add this to my collection of photos of museum walls,

along with the yellow behind Chi Chi the Giant Panda which you can read about, here.

At home I find that Chocolate Orange,

 and tell my family all about how Brazil nuts grow.

I should have perhaps shared my chocolate orange, all in the name of learning in museums,
but food and drink are not allowed in the galleries, it encourages pests.

Discovery for All at the Horniman Museum is every Sunday morning in the Hands-on Base.

Details on the website, here.

Chocolate Oranges best left at home.