Art, Design & Architecture

The new novel by Sir Salman Rushdie has fired the imaginations of animation students at London’s Kingston University who have been commissioned by the publisher Random House to produce four animated films based on the book.

Luka and the Fire of Life is Sir Salman’s second children’s novel. It tells the story of 12-year-old Luka Khalifa and his quest to steal the fire of life to revive his father Rashid who has fallen into a deep sleep. Reviews of the book have compared it to work by J.M.Barrie, Kipling and J.K.Rowling.

Ten students from the University’s Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture visited Random House to meet Sir Salman and present their ideas. The author was part of a judging panel which awarded several prizes for the best concepts. “The quality of the work from the students has been astounding,” the publisher’s head of marketing Roger Bratchell said. “It’s been very enjoyable to work with such an imaginative and diverse group of young people from Kingston University.”

The panel felt Yao Xiang produced the best character design. “The most daunting bit was after we had given our presentations,” she said. “We couldn’t tell what the judges thought about our work and we had to go and wait in a small room. I was so surprised when they said they liked my work the best.”

“It was great that Sir Salman was so open-minded,” senior lecturer in animation Damian Gascoigne remarked. “He didn’t seem wedded to a fixed idea of how his characters should look but seemed extremely receptive to some very individual interpretations of the figures from the book.

“The work he chose was a surprise to me – but in a good way. He didn’t latch on to those ideas that had obvious commercial appeal but, instead, selected some that were really trying to do something a bit different.”

“Projects like this are the lifeblood of art and design at universities,” he added. “They’re exactly what the students most want and invaluable to the relevance of our teaching at Kingston University.”

Coming from south-west China, Yao knew very little about Sir Salman who won the Booker prize in 1981 for Midnight’s Children. “I had seen his other children’s book, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, but that was all,” she said, admitting she had not been aware of the enormous international attention focused on Rushdie after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against him in 1989.

Yao’s favourite character from ‘Luka and the Fire of Life’ was Soraya, the Queen of Ott. “She gets angry very easily,” Yao explained, “so it was a tough challenge to create a face that looked as though it was about to explode with rage.

“I didn’t use any traditional Chinese techniques when I created these characters – in fact I even used Russian ink. I really wanted to draw more upon the new things I’ve learnt at University in Kingston,” she added.

Sarah Maycock from East Sussex won a special prize for the best illustration. She painted five characters, including Luka’s two companions – a bear named Dog and a dog named Bear. Talking about the meeting with Sir Salman, Sarah said she didn’t feel all that nervous. “There was a really lovely feeling of camaraderie among the students. We were so supportive of each other,” she said.

Four visual concepts, Yao’s and those by Sam Falconer, Ben Tobitt and Jun Hyoung Chun, were selected by Random House to be made into animations, which it is planning to put on its website and on YouTube. The four students will meet Sir Salman again on December 21^st when he will watch their finished one-minute films and choose an overall winner.

Another Kingston graduate joins the set design team at BDA

Rowena Oven is the latest graduate of the MA Production Design for Film and Television to join the Set Design team at global creative agency BDA ( Bruce Dunlop and Associates) which is headed by industry leader Simon Jago.

BDA set design creates studio environments for major television news broadcasters around the world – Simon Jago was responsible for the seminal design of Channel 4 and BBC news among many others.

Simon is seen on the left in the photograph above alongside members of his team – all graduates of the MA course.

From left to right these are Rowena who has recently joined as design assistant and graduated last month, Sophie Griffiths( Kingston Graduate 1992 and now a senior designer at BDA)

Peter Aston (a designer at BDA who graduated from the course in 2006) and Will Smith ( also a designer and a graduate from 2005) .

All three designers are involved with the design process from conceptualization through to installation. Sophie is currently designing a project in the middle East while working on two channel re- designs in the UK. A recent project for Peter was designing the sets for ITV’s election coverage and over the last three years he has worked on an array of prestigious projects for clients such as the BBC, Sky and Arab Telemedia in Jordan. Will has been recently involved in the re-design of the Sky News main studio in Osterley as well as the design for Sky News’ Westminster studio.

Peter says of his time on Simon Jago’s team

‘ Working at BDA has been a great experience, our team…has a fantastic creative atmosphere. Everyone is encouraged to share ideas which makes concept development great fun. I also get to work on a wide variety of interesting projects with global brands that take us from Manchester to Sydney- you never get a boring day working here!’

Senior Lecturer’s work on art, regeneration, ‘publics’ and state building the focus of survey publication by Mute Publishing.

Roman Vasseur, currently fractional Senior Lecturer in the School of Fine Art, Kingston was Lead Artist for Harlow New Town, from 2007-2009. The town, entirely master-planned by the architect Sir Frederick Gibberd employed primarily sculpture, including early works by Moore and Hepworth as part of a process of State Building with art at the core of its vision. Vasseur was responsible for curating a series of projects for the town under the title Let Us Pray for Those Now Residing in the Designated Area and assisted in the selection of an architect / developer team to redevelop the town’s core spaces and buildings. How the science –(fact)ion of a now worn utopian project marry with the (fact)ions of contemporary neo liberal development are discussed by the resulting project and this recent survey publication.

No Room to Move:

Radical Art and the Regenerate City

Published by Mute Magazine

Edited by Josephine Berry Slater & Anthony Iles

Featuring projects and interviews with: Alberto Duman, Freee, Nils Norman, Laura Oldfield Ford and Roman Vasseur

As the Creative City model for urban regeneration founders on the rocks of the recession, and the New Labour public art commissioning frenzy it triggered recedes, Anthony Iles and Josephine Berry Slater take stock of an era of highly instrumentalised public art making.

Focusing on artists and consultants who have engaged critically with the exclusionary politics of urban regeneration, their analysis locates such practice within a schematic history of urban development’s neoliberal mode.

Breaking down into a report and a collection of interviews, this investigation consistently focuses on the forms and, indeed, possibility of critical public art within a regime that fetishes ‘creativity’ whilst systematically destroying its preconditions in its pursuit of capital accumulation. How, they ask, is critical art shaped by its interaction with this aspect of biopolitical governance?

Available in softback only, 124 pages, 34 colour illustrations, 176 x 229 mm

Buy from our store on Amazon.co.uk, £14.95

Biography:
Roman Vasseur is an artist living and working in London. He has exhibited at Jeffrey Charles Gallery (London), the ICA (London), KX Gallery (Hamburg) and most recently Die Neue Actions Gallerie (Berlin). He has contributed to conferences and panel discussions at such venues as Tate Britain, the ICA and the Arnolfini, Bristol. Vasseur has taught at various universities including IUAV, Venice, the Architectural Association, The Royal Academy schools and UWE, Bristol.

AN URBAN ADVENTURE: INBETWEEN TIME FESTIVAL UNLEASHED!

From the 1-5 Dec 2010 Inbetween Time Festival of Live Art and Intrigue will be pervading streets, sites and art spaces across the city of Bristol. Over 75 events involving 130 artists from Mexico, Australia, Austria, Germany, Serbia, Belgium, USA and all over the UK will make up a breakneck programme of live, digital, sound, sculptural, architectural, dance, theatre and guerrilla works across the five days.

With a curatorial theme of What Next For the Body? all the works have been commissioned or will be specially presented for Inbetween Time Festival 2010 – from intimate one-on-one performances and significant international premières, to modest early ideas and ambitious curatorial pieces.

Inbetween Time Festival is co-produced by Inbetween Time Productions in collaboration with Arnolfini, who also act as the exhibition hub of the festival. The exhibitions and Live Art programme at Arnolfini will include major works from Teresa Margolles, Kira O’Reilly, Jordan McKenzie, Zoran Todorovic, Hancock & Kelly Live and Paul Hurley.

Elsewhere in Bristol, at partner venues and sites across the city, including Circomedia, Wickham Theatre, Cube and Bridewell Island, will be new works by Richard Maxwell, Rajni Shah, Doris Uhlich, Ivana Müller, Manuel Vason, Blast Theory and Tim Etchells. There will also be premières from Action Hero, Back to Back and Duncan Speakman and Sarah Anderson as well as the launch of a new project by Quarantine.

Throughout the five days there will be encounters with the best local Live Artists, cropping up in the most unexpected places across Bristol, and a packed diary of parties and happenings. The full programme is available on the website at www.inbetweentime.co.uk.

A very limited number of Festival Passes are available for the whole five days and will allow holders into every single show. Festival Passes can be booked now through Arnolfini on +44 (0)117 917 2300/01 or at www.arnolfini.org.uk. Individual event tickets are also available from £2-£11, many of the shows are limited capacity so please book early to avoid disappointment.

For regular updates please visit www.inbetweentime.co.uk and sign up for the E-newsletter.

Let the intrigue begin…

END

Released by Inbetween Time Productions. For further information or interviews please contact Sharmila Bousa on sharmila@inbetweentime.co.uk or 07815 909975.

Notes

Inbetween Time: Festival of Live Art and Intrigue

01 December 2010 – 05 December 2011 with an ongoing programme until February 2011

Inbetween Time Festival is produced by Bristol based Inbetween Time Productions in partnership with Arnolfini.  Inbetween Time Productions, established by Director Helen Cole, was a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Breakthrough Award for Exceptional Cultural Entrepreneurs in 2009 and is at the forefront of a generation of new producers unencumbered by art form, discipline, location or venue. Inbetween Time collaborates with the most innovative contemporary artists, encouraging them and their audiences to do things they haven’t yet imagined.

Inbetween Time Productions is funded by Paul Hamlyn Foundation and is a creative industry partner of Bristol University. IBT 10 is funded by Arts Council and Bristol City Council.

This is the fourth Inbetween Time Festival but the first to step outside the institution it was born in and become independent. The first three festivals took place in Bristol in 2001, 2003 and 2006. The festival is the brainchild of Director and founder Helen Cole and came out of the vibrant Live programme that she curated during her time at Arnolfini. The first three festivals came under the Arnolfini umbrella.

With new commissioning and interdisciplinary experimentation at its heart, Inbetween Time Festival garnered critical acclaim and a growing international reputation for the warmth of its welcome and the inventiveness of its curatorial programme. Body-based installations, large scale technology works, robotics, site specific theatre, durational performance, marathons, intimate one-on-one encounters, parties, picnics and ball-games came together for each festival. By 2006 Inbetween Time was even spawning its own fringe. Dr Roberts Bus (which makes a welcome return during the 2010 festival) with its own programme of unplugged gigs and strange goings on around Bristol’s dockside.

In 2006 Inbetween Time showed the work of 50 artists with an audience of over 39,000.

Centre for Useless Splendour (Contemporary Art Research
Centre) warmly invites you to the following events

Wednesday November 24 2010– 5.15pm- 6pm

Book Launch and launch of three Artists Editions.

In the PhD studio (room 58) ground floor Knights Park.

Centre for Useless Splendour – A Book

A collection of works from artists and researchers from the Contemporary Art Research Centre brought together in book form, curated and designed by Dean Kenning.

Published by the Centre for Useless Splendour KT1 2QJ 2010

112 pp full colour ISBN:  978-0-9563-782-4-8

Artists Editions

PhD students from the Centre for Useless Splendour – S E Barnet, Matthew Thompson, Arnaud Desjarin have produced a limited edition screen print in advance of their 2011 research statement exhibitions.

Becky Beasley’s Exhibition 8th May 1904, will be opening at the Stanley Picker gallery 6-8pm.

When visitors enter the Stanley Picker Gallery next week at the opening of 8th May 1904, Kingston, they will be astonished to find themselves standing on the shores of the American Great Lakes. The Gallery is currently being transformed by artist Becky Beasley into a dramatic aerial landscape inspired by a story about the photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge, (Kingston upon Thames 1830-1904) who was reputed to be constructing a scale model of the American Great Lakes in his back garden in Kingston, at the end of his life.

Over the course of more than a year, Becky Beasley visited Kingston Museum archives to research some of the many ambiguities in Muybridge’s own life story. Becky Beasley’s visits to the archives and to Muybridge’s garden have fuelled a narrative fantasy about his last sculptural project, allowing her to pair a fiction about him – his gardening project and his death – with a meditation on photography itself.

The new panorama of Muybridge’s garden is displayed as individual colour postcards on a revolving unit normally used for selling holiday souvenirs. Exploring the epic and domestic dimensions of the Muybridge garden myth, a silhouette of the American Great Lakes is laid onto the floor of the gallery. Cut from linoleum, the gallery floor becomes a graphic representation and minimal re-enactment of the garden as Muybridge might have conceived it, as well as a vast visual landscape mapping the geography of the exhibition space. Completing the exhibition is a series of large, gelatine-silver prints of black, tabular objects, rotated in from of the camera to produce distinct views.

About Muybridge in Kingston

Muybridge in Kingston is an exciting partnership between Kingston University and the Royal Borough of Kingston that is celebrating and investigating the Kingston Museum Muybridge Bequest.

For most of his professional career Muybridge lived and worked in the United States, but bequeathed his personal collection of material to his hometown in England. Held at Kingston Museum & Archive, this important collection includes his original Zoopraxiscope machine and unique glass discs; many personalised lantern slides; collotype prints; rare early albums; a copy of his epic San Franscisco Panorama; his own scrapbook in which he charts his entire career; and many other items that make this collection of major international significance. Muybridge’s groundbreaking work remains a key inspiration to practitioners across an array of interdisciplinary fields.

As a key element of Muybridge in Kingston, the Stanley Picker Gallery is celebrating his lifetime’s achievements through the eyes of two contemporary artists who have been given privileged access to rare material held at the Kingston Museum archives. These new commissions, Dance of Ordinariness, by Trevor Appleson, recently shown at the Stanley Picker Gallery, and shortly being exhibited at the Miami Art Fair in December, and 8th May 1904, Kingston, by Becky Beasley, provide us with twenty-first Century perspectives on a world-class historical collection, and exploring new ways of considering the ongoing impact of Muybridge’s influential work.

The exhibition will be open at the Stanley Picker Gallery from 24 November to 5 February 2011.

Visit www.stanleypickergallery.org for more information and www.MuybridgeinKingston.com

Where: Stanley Picker Gallery

What: Exhibition launch 6-8.30pm

When: 24^th November 2010

Becky Beasley Panorama 2010
revolving postcard tree, postcards

Courtesy the Artist, Laura Bartlett Gallery & Office Baroque

The simplest ideas are often the best ones – especially in the world of design. For animation student Napatsawan Chirayukool at Kingston University in London, the idea of asking different people “What makes your day?” proved to be a masterstroke.

Twenty three year old Napatsawan, who’s originally from Bangkok in Thailand, has won one of 10 Adobe Design Achievement Awards, for her heart-warming two-minute animation of the “little pieces of happiness” that make a person’s day.

More than 20,000 students from 152 different countries entered this year’s 10th anniversary awards, which honour the most talented and promising student graphic designers, photographers, illustrators, animators, digital filmmakers, developers and computer artists from the world’s top higher education institutions.

Nan, as she’s known to tutors and fellow students at Kingston, called her submission ‘What Makes Your Day?’ It contains snippets of interviews from people depicted as rabbits, each answering the simple question. Nan conducted the interviews among friends and colleagues, children at a special school, retired women at a day centre and people she met in the street. The answers she received included “Liverpool winning”, “a really big box of Sugar Puffs” and “my amazing girlfriend”.

“I was shocked when I found out that I’d won,” said Nan. “So much of the other work in the competition was really sophisticated and professional – and my animation was just these bunnies running on a screen. But I think there’s so much doom and gloom around at the moment that people must have enjoyed the positive feel of my work.”

“It’s a beautiful piece of work,” says Lawrence Zeegen, Head of Kingston University’s School of Communication Design. “It stood out straight away. It’s the perfect fusion of her Thai background and culture and an English aesthetic and sense of humour.” Mr Zeegen was one of the judges of the global awards but had to sit out the final round of judging when it emerged that a Kingston student was in the running for a major prize.

Nan originally came to Kingston because she wanted to study illustration. However, during their first year, all illustrators get a chance to try their hand at animation. “The first time I saw my work move on screen it was the moment you see your baby taking their first steps. I knew this was what I wanted to do,” she recalled.

Nan, who graduated this summer, received $3000, a 3D award and a copy of Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Collection software. She’s briefly returning to Thailand then aiming to establish herself in the United Kingdom. The music on her winning entry was composed by Kingston student Roger Pinsent.

For more information about Nan and her work visit:

http://www.napatsawanchirayukool.adaagallery.com/