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Amelia’s Magazine | The Best of Bust Magazine Christmas Craftacular, London 2010

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Bust Craftacular
All photography by Amelia Gregory.

My ability to get out and about has been seriously curtailed over the past few weeks by the need to get my new book finished, ambulance but last weekend (but one) I was pretty determined to make it along to the Bust Craftacular at Bethnal Green’s York Hall, page if only for a mad dash around the stalls.

Bust Craftacular-Bethnal Green

Inside the old Victorian hall it was absolutely heaving with craft enthusiasts – mainly women (many with small children in tow) but also a small peppering of arty looking boys. It was like entering a multi coloured kaleidoscopic alternative universe where crafting & handmade reigns supreme – bright things everywhere vying for my attention amidst a frantic din enhanced by a backdrop of very loud music.

So, buy I whipped around the regimented rows of stalls as quick as I could, taking notes of the best stuff I found so that if you didn’t manage to make it along you’ll be able to sniff out the best stuff online. Keep in mind those last minute Christmas gifts you might need to buy as you take a gander through this little lot:

Vic Lee

Vic Lee makes printed scenes of well known hipster (can I say that in the UK?) London districts such as Broadway Market and Kingsland Road. Perfect for the East End man in your life – because let’s face it, most of them feature East London. The limited edition prints are produced on cotton paper and screen printed with environmentally friendly water based acrylic inks. They look really stunning up close, and also caught the eye of Jessica Furseth when she visited the East London Design Show.

Bust Craftacular-Xiang Zeng

Xiang Zeng is a textile designer who has produced a range of lovely printed cushions and make your own soft toy bear kits. Really cute, they look pretty easy to make so would also be perfect for and a crafty friend or even a handy older kid.

Bust Craftacular-seaside sisters owls
Bust Craftacular-fabric nation

I picked up a business card for Seaside Sisters at the Fabric Nation stall… so I am not entirely sure who to credit these wonderful owls and cushions to. Their stall was a brilliantly over the top feast for the eyes in an already overwhelming place. Loved the stuff they make from old vintage fabrics.

Bust Craftacular-andrea garland

Andrea Garland fills old tins with natural skincare goodies: what an amazing idea but no doubt a huge amount of hard work to find all those fab tins. She’s a trained aromatherapist who makes all her products from scratch in Hackney with as many organic and fairtrade ingredients as possible and I am very pleased to learn that none are tested on animals – but I guess that scenario is far less likely when using these kind of ingredients anyway – just one more reason to buy natural beauty brands. She sells at Liberty, Urban Outfitters and at Tatty Devine, and Viola Levy also gives her a mention in her run down of top natural beauty brands earlier this week. What a find – it goes without saying that her stall was very busy.

Bust Craftacular-shop jill

Looking for a nice little purse, or perhaps a unique oyster card holder? Jill makes the perfect thing: I was utterly transfixed by her beautifully laid out stall, featuring an array of charming goodies with graphic printed animal designs that would suit a man too. She also did a nice line in limited edition screen prints.

Bust Craftacular-Dot your Teas and Cross your Eyes

Dot your Teas and Cross your Eyes is a fashion and accessories designer by the name of Chloe. Her bold spotted print designs embellished fabulous silky dresses and she also makes some fabulous recycled fabric pom pom fascinators.

Bust Craftacular-urban cross stitch

Now for the craft loving man in your life: Urban Cross Stitch create cross stitch Star Wars kits. A wonderful meeting of 80s pop culture and the noughties crafting craze: what better way to inspire a bloke to get into this most relaxing of traditional techniques.

Bust Craftacular-James Ward plates

Last but very much not least, just as I was rounding the corner to leave I chanced upon James Ward’s plates, featuring an assortment of friendly animal characters accompanied by immortal phrases such as ‘I eat my cake in my pants’. Perfect for the parents who have everything but would nevertheless quite like to add to their piles of amusing kitchen ware.

Bust Craftacular cakes
Gratuitous cake photo…. yum yum. Now what are you waiting for? Step away from the High Street and support these talented artists and makers this Christmas… they are only a click away.

Written by Amelia Gregory on Wednesday December 8th, 2010 3:00 pm

Categories ,andrea garland, ,Beauty, ,Bethnal Green, ,Broadway Market, ,Bust Craftacular, ,craft, ,Dot your Teas and Cross your Eyes, ,East London Design Show, ,Fabric Nation, ,fairtrade, ,James Ward, ,Kingsland Road, ,liberty, ,organic, ,owls, ,Seaside Sisters, ,Shop Jill, ,Skincare, ,Star Wars, ,Tatty Devine, ,Urban Cross Stitch, ,Urban Outfitters, ,Vic Lee, ,vintage, ,Xiang Zeng, ,York Hall

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Amelia’s Magazine | Urs Fischer: Molding Objects to Imperfection

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6All Photographs courtesy of New Museum, viagra buy except where otherwise stated

It is now time for the absurd to take center stage. Swiss-born “imperfectionist” Urs Ficher makes the gallery goer rethink his or her own reality and I am grateful to the New Museum for introducing me to this brilliant artist. Ficher is an artist renown for his non-traditional creations. Thinking the world as a populated center of objects that interact and create an artificial reality, his aim is to call the viewer’s attention to his singular inner realm; his interpretations of what this life is are conveyed through different types of installations. New productions and iconic works are aplenty and together compose a series of gigantic still life and walk-in tableaux choreographed entirely by the artist. I find myself exploring neither a traditional survey nor a retrospective but the culmination of four years of work. These new productions reveal the true scope of Fischer’s universe and I am enthralled by what I am discovering.

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IMG_6475

Above photograph courtesy of Vanesa Krongold

Fischer has taken over all the three floors of the museum. Illusion and reality are intertwined in the artist ‘s show thanks to a game of trading places and multiple reflections. Chrome boxes are arranged in a grid of monoliths that create a cityscape of mirrored cubes onto which the artist has silk screened a dizzying array of images. I think it’s perfect; It’s just how I’ve been feeling when walking about New York city – drunk from trying to take it all in! It is very interesting how the artist plays with bi dimensions; I am strangely attracted by some disregarded toys. Its all about combining the reality through dimensions, perspectives, and collage. The viewer is thrust into an uneasy place, trying to understand how to walk in this new world. The hyper real state of the objects are meant to represent your and my reality…

72009 Plaster, paint, bread 10 x 21 x 15 cm.

Urs Fischer presents an installation that turns the Museum’s architecture into an image of itself—a site-specific trompe l’oeil environment. In a maddening reproduction exercise, each square inch of the Museum architecture has been photographed and reprinted as a wallpaper that covers these very same walls and ceiling it is meant to portray. A piano occupies the room, appearing to melt under the pressure of some invisible force. Simultaneously solid and soft like a Salvador Dalí painting in three dimensions, this sculpture seems to succumb to a dramatic process of metamorphosis.

8Marguerite de Ponty.

On the fourth floor, Fischer presents five new aluminum sculptures cast from small clays and hand-molded by the artist. Hanging from the ceiling or balancing awkwardly in space, these massive abstractions resemble strange cocoons or a gathering of enigmatic monuments. Fischer is an engineer of imaginary worlds who has in the past created sculptures in a rich variety of materials, including unstable substances such as melting wax and rotting vegetables. In a continuous search for new plastic solutions, Fischer has built houses out of bread and given life to animated puppets; he has dissected objects or blown them out of proportion in order to reinvent our relationship to them.

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In 2007, in a now-legendary exhibition, he excavated the floor of his New York gallery, digging a crater within the exhibition space. Throughout his work, with ambitious gestures and irreverent panache, Fischer explores the secret mechanisms of perception, combining a Pop immediacy with a Neo-Baroque sense for the absurd. And I am glad a taste of it!

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The exhibition Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty is ending on February the 7th, 2010. The New Museum is a modern building located in 235 Bowery Street, New-York.

Written by Vanesa krongold on Wednesday February 3rd, 2010 1:21 pm

Categories ,Absurd, ,Aluminium, ,art, ,Art space, ,baroque, ,Clay, ,contemporary art, ,Exhibition Review, ,Hand molded, ,installation, ,Material, ,New Museum, ,new york, ,organic, ,review, ,Salvator Dali, ,sculpture, ,Still Life, ,surrealism, ,toy, ,Urs Fischer

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Amelia’s Magazine | Illustrator interview: Alice Stevenson creates artwork for Amy’s Mobile Kitchen

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Amys Mobile Kitchen 1
During February 2016 the vegetarian and organic food experts of Amy’s Kitchen bring you Amy’s Mobile Kitchen – a vintage van that serves delicious Amy’s soups and chillis across London, Manchester and Glasgow, free to those who make a donation to local charitable organisations. The delicious & warming soups & chillis are accompanied by outstandingly good bread from local artisan bakeries.

Joining this project is artist Alice Stevenson, who has previously created illustrations for fashion designer Marc Jacobs. Alice has created a bespoke logo for Amy’s Mobile Kitchen as well as designing the bright illustrations that adorn the van, making it impossible to miss as it travels the UK streets. She is a London based illustrator, artist and writer whose creative output is informed by her observations of the world around her, using striking colour palettes, playful compositions and decorative forms to communicate ideas and narratives. Below, Alice Stevenson kindly tells us more about this lovely project.

Amy kitchen van
How were you commissioned to do the artwork?
Margaret (creative agency) found me through the power of Google and thought I’d be perfect for the project.

Amy's Mobile Kitchen person
What was the brief and how much artistic leeway were you given to do as you wished?
The brief was quite open: to create an intricate and playful pattern covering the van which featured Amy’s ingredients and worked around the Amy’s logo. I came up with some initial approaches and the version featuring “ingredients inside ingredients” were unanimously considered the most successful and visually engaging, so I developed this approach to fit around the structure of the truck. When developing ideas for the illustration for the Amy’s Kitchen Food Truck, I wanted to capture the joy of eating food created from organic vegetables and natural ingredients. As a keen cook and lover of organic food, this is a subject very close to my heart. I’ve always been inspired by the shapes and colours of vegetables and natural produce, So the illustration ended up being a playful celebration of this. I wanted to give the illustration an energy and a sense of movement and also explore the way the shapes of vegetables can combine to create something beautiful and decorative. By putting smaller ingredients inside larger ones, I encourage the viewer to really look into the imagery and engage with it.

Amy kitchen logo
How did you create the artwork?
Initially I create pencil sketches of compositions and ideas. When developing the illustration I scan black & white drawings of the shapes used in the image, I fill them to create block colour elements on photoshop and then arrange them on layers, this gives me the freedom to experiment with composition. Once the illustration had been approved I converted the different elements to vectors so that they could be printed on a large scale.

alice stevenson prawn_illustration
Pineapple and Prawn personal work

What is your favourite vegetable to eat (and why)?
I love vegetables so much, there isn’t a vegetable I won’t eat, so this is a near impossible question! I think one of the best vegetable experiences I’ve ever had was a side dish of purple sprouting broccoli, steamed with garlic and mustard in Jojo’s: a wonderful restaurant in Tankerton, Kent. The broccoli had the most complex and rich flavour. My boyfriend and I still reminisce about it years later. Nothing beats simply prepared, organic or home-grown veg for deliciousness.

Alice Stevenson LePan
Alice Stevenson, Le Pan magazine

What is your favourite vegetable to draw (and why)?
Halved red cabbage is extremely satisfying to draw due to it’s intricate texture and pattern, I’ve done some lovely watercolour and ink studies of those over the years. I think any vegetable cut in half is fun to draw as the interplay between its form and shape and then the seeds inside it are very rewarding to explore.

Alice stevenson i saw three ships
alice stevenson partridge_christmascard
Christmas card designs.

Make sure you track down Amy’s Mobile Kitchen if it passes your way! Keep track of the van’s location by following @amyskitchenuk on Twitter and following the hashtag #amysmobilekitchen. And look out for the elegantly painted sides of the truck, thanks to Alice Stevenson.

Written by Amelia Gregory on Thursday February 11th, 2016 10:48 pm

Categories ,#amysmobilekitchen, ,@amyskitchenuk, ,Alice Stevenson, ,Amy’s Kitchen, ,Amy’s Mobile Kitchen, ,Food, ,illustration, ,Marc Jacobs, ,Margaret, ,organic, ,vegetarian, ,Veggie

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