Engineer's Daughter

open

Tonight I give you a link to a gallery of pictures by Tim Wainwright, who was commissioned by Britain's Housing Corporation to photograph and interview ordinary individuals and families whose lives were changed for the better after they moved into affordable housing.  Wainwright's images are absolutely beautiful, and good for a dose of positivity on the eve of what I know is going to be an amazing election.  I already voted; have you?

the royal alexandra children's hospital

A children's hospital in Brighton has this year beaten out buildings such as the Royal Festival Hall and the Young Vic to take Britain's Prime Minister's Better Public Building Award.  The Royal Alexandra children's hospital, known to its friends as the Alex, first opened in 1881 but used the opportunity offered by a recent move to a new space to brighten its design and take advantage of increased floor area.  The result is a building filled with light and air and where every room has a view of the sea and trundle beds for parents.  The Guardian has some lovely pictures, and also talked to hospital executive Duncan Selbie:

"Now they have the space, facilities and equipment to provide a vast range of clinical and therapeutic services in an environment skillfully designed to accommodate 21st-century healthcare."

No Brighton tack here!  Yeah and not bad for what some people in America would call a socialist health care system.

the fred festival in cumbria

I visited Cumbria a number of times during my year in England, and the beautiful green hills and valleys there hold some very fond memories for me.  I remember drinking hot Ribena out of a thermos on the side of a snowy moutain, a candlelit Christmas Eve service in a teeny tiny church, a romantic evening on the shore of a moody Lake Windermere and of course approximately three thousand sheep.  It would have been super-fun to get back to the area earlier this month during the FRED arts festival that encouraged visitors to tramp through the countryside to find art by a roster of international artists.  Many works this year were politically-themed, including Ettie Spencer's All Wrapped Up, pictured here, that encased a farmhouse in plastic and wire as a way of calling attention to the disappearing hill farms in the district.  Rachel Pugh talked to the artist:

"Most of us live in urban areas," points out Spencer. "Hill farming is no longer profitable and it could easily slip through our fingers without us noticing. The role of artists is to flag up issues and be assertive."

Some pieces from the festival traveled to the considerably more urban environs of the SCOPE Art Fair in London last weekend, but you can see some images of the art out in the wild here.

art in hospitals

The default for art in hospitals and doctors' offices seems to range from purely bland to downright awful, but not so where artist Gina Glover is involved.  Her clever photomontages such as Chromosome Socks, pictured right, cheerfully comment on biology and the miracle of life, and I can imagine patients feeling better just looking at them.  The art she has created for hospitals and clinics (including some awesome pieces for the Assisted Conception Unit at Guy’s and St Thomas in London) recently won her a medal from Britain's Royal Photographic Society, and Saba Salman talked to Glover about her work:

One of the challenges, she explains, is making sure that complex and highly emotive areas of practice, such as assisted reproduction, are portrayed accurately and sensitively. "Medical science and art are both inventive, but in very different ways," she says. "Put them together, and they can cross-fertilise and inspire each other."

Pun very much intended, I'm sure.  See more of Glover's work at Art in Hospitals, or in the Guardian gallery here.

line of vision

Currently on display in the Learning Gallery of Britain's National Gallery: a show called Line of Vision featuring work created by young mothers and also foster children during two art-making sessions the museum held earlier this year.  The foster (or looked after) children worked together to create dioramas that explore ideas of space in paintings from the National Gallery's collection, while the young mothers put together beautiful memory boxes that took inspiration from classic paintings depicting motherhood.  The project not only inspires new connections to art but also simply encourages the participants to have fun making their own pieces.  The broad smiles on the mamas' faces once they get going on their boxes say it all.  You can see more pictures here.

art for babies

Awesome book alert!  Taking into consideration research that shows newborn babies react favorably to black-and-white images, the new book Art for Baby collects some excellent two-tone images from contemporary art.  Julian Opie, pictured right, is featured, as well as the likes of Takashi Murakami, Kazimir Malevich and David Shrigley.  Proceeds from sales go to support Britain's National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and the book also includes a fold-out frieze to put on your little one's wall.  See more of the included artwork here.

victorian buildings under threat

Every year the Victorian Society in Britain releases a list of their top ten endangered buildings in the hopes of encouraging their preservation, and their choices for 2008 are all examples of some truly gorgeous architecture.  The Stonebridge School in north-west London, pictured right, was built in 1898 and is still used by two schools but has been marked for redevelopment by the local council.  It literally hurts my heart to think it might be ripped down, but many of the buildings on the Society's list have structural problems and I'm sure it's considered more economical to start over rather than preserve.  You can see more pictures here, including an impressive old mill in Huddersfield and the Moseley Road Baths in Birmingham.

mental health and art

The way I use art-viewing as therapy during a tough work week, it comes as no surprise that solid research was recently published that shows that art-making can significantly help individuals with mental health issues.  Sarah Morrison reported on a study that was carried out in Britain by Anglia Ruskin University, the University of Central Lancashire and South Essex Partnership National Health Service foundation trust:

The benefits to mental health varied depending on the individual involved but were said to include improved confidence and self-acceptance, an improved sense of pride and achievement and an alleviation of worries and responsibilities.

I hope this gives organizations like Borderland Voices, Roshni Ghar and Worthington and Littlehampton MIND more public acclaim for the important work that they're doing.  You can see some of the groups' artists' work and read their inspiring testimonials here.

artist kim noble's multiple perspectives

Dissociative identity disorder is one of the more intriguing mental health conditions, where a person's brain divides itself into distinct personalities most commonly as a means of dealing with extremely traumatic events.  I think everyone boxes up certain distressing things in their head to some degree (and personally I know how unhealthy it is for me if they stay unintegrated for too long), but for artist Kim Noble there are over a dozen different identities, or "alters", sharing her body.  Each alter has varying awareness of Noble's condition, but all of them paint.  Mark Drinkwater talked to Noble about the unique challenges her condition presents as an artist:

While her work has received much acclaim from mental health professionals, Noble has found it harder to convince galleries to exhibit her diverse collection. Noble's dominant personality, Patricia, said: "I'm seen as an 'outsider', or untrained, artist. Also, when I first started looking for galleries to exhibit at, I didn't mention DID. Galleries would say 'come back when your style has settled'. In the end I felt I had to let them know about DID and all the different personalities."

Paintings by all of Noble's alters were recently on display at Novas Contemporary Urban Centre - London Bridge Bankside, and you can see some images from the show here.  It's fascinating to look at the wildly divergent styles such as the one used by Abi, above, each one of them a completely solid vision in its own right.

dadafest

For a strong dose of inspiration tonight I'm looking through photos of performers in the recent DaDaFest which took place in Liverpool earlier this month.  DaDa in this case stands for Disability and Deaf Arts and featured everything from burlesque to art exhibits to crutch-based aerial dance from Claire Cunningham, pictured right.  I love the description of Aaron Williamson's performance piece in which he set up barriers that gave disabled people direct access to a festival venue but sent able-bodied attendees the long way 'round.  DaDaFest proves that the term "differently abled" goes far beyond mere political correctness.