Art, Design & Architecture

Kingston alumni and eco designer  Osian Batyka-Williams is being featured in the new advertising campaign by shoe company New Balance as one of their ‘Excellent Makers’. Osian now works as an industrial designer, furniture maker, teacher and builder and believes in utilizing eco-friendly practices as often as possible— with most of his pieces featuring recycled and/or reclaimed materials.

As part of the campaign, Osian be working with them on various projects and producing some commission pieces over the next twelve month.

To see the campaign and to find out more, please visit:

http://www.newbalance.com/facebook/excellent-makers/excellent-maker-osian.php

Exhibiting their latest creations at London Fashion Week can be a dream come true for even the most established of fashion designers. So a group of 18 Kingston University fashion students could hardly believe their luck when they found their work in the limelight at one of the industry’s most prestigious events just a few months into the first year of their degree.

After teaming up with top British artist and designer Dr Noki, they have just showcased their work as part of London Fashion Week’s Estethica exhibition. The ethical showcase, which celebrates designers who reuse, reinvent and recycle, played home to the students’ creations which gave a quirky lease of life to old items of clothing.

“The starting point for the project was inspired by a book Dr Noki showed us called Not a Toy,” 19-year-old student Steph Smith explained. “It was full of genderless, faceless characters which is what we wanted to create using the old clothing that we sourced.”

All 55 first year students promptly set to work gathering items of clothing from attics and charity shops, grouping garments that would work together to help them create a series of towering textile creations, dubbed fashion couture monsters in Dr Noki’s design brief.

“We worked in pairs taking the discarded clothes apart and then set about piecing them together into something new,” fellow student Juan Torkel Spade, 22, said. “My partner Rene Bedell and I tried shredding and unravelling knit pieces, also knitting our own individual sleeves and trouser legs to incorporate into our design.”

The design process was different to what they were used to. “I usually build something up after working with a sketch and trying out different pattern cutting techniques,” Argentinean-born Juan said.

The students’ even had the chance to bring some of their creations to life in a film screened during London Fashion Week. “Finally wearing our work and being a physical part of it was really exciting,” Steph said. “Seeing it beamed on to the big screen in the main courtyard at Somerset House was amazing and totally unexpected.”

Dr Noki who is well known for pushing the boundaries of design with his NHS (Noki’s House of Sustainability) brand of customised clothing and sustainable silhouettes, praised the young designers for their energy and enthusiasm. “I like to teach students how to balance the need for change through fashion textiles, but keeping the emphasis purely on creative design. I feel this is paramount at such a young age,” he said.

The results were extremely impressive, Dr Noki added. “All the students worked incredibly hard during the project,” he said. “It wasn’t always my intention to exhibit so many of their designs but, thanks to the British Fashion Council’s Estethica platform, the project has been pushed further, wider and faster than I ever imagined.”

Course director Elinor Renfrew said the collaboration really encouraged the students to stretch themselves. “Graduate Fashion Week has always been an excellent opportunity for us to showcase our work, but for our first years to be exhibiting their designs with Dr Noki at London Fashion Week was absolutely fantastic,” she said. “The way the students worked together and responded to a brief with a very tight deadline was phenomenal.”

The Kingston students’ ‘Fashion Freaks’ were on show throughout London Fashion Week, which ran from 17 to 21 February.

Science and Design – alternative Xmas market – So Far, The Future Gallery - 44 Emerald Street, London WC1N 3LH

In 2012 the School of Design is leading on Dream Lab, an interdisciplinary science/design project delivered to 40 Chinese Universities. To kick start the theme a seasonal recommendation: Rebecca  Pohencenik, one of our School of Design alumni and a Dream Lab team member is launching 12 Days of Science and Design, 8-20 December, 12-7pm. So Far, The Future: http://www.so-far-the-future.co.uk/exhibitions/12-days-of-science-design

On sale are science/design Xmas gifts/wrapping paper and workshops curated by super/collider.  Register for the workshops at: www.super-collider.com.

Andy Holden & Tyler Woolcott: Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape

Performance Lecture

Thursday 1 December* 2011 6pm at the Stanley Picker Gallery

Andy Holden and Tyler Woolcott present Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape on Thursday 1 December* from 6–8 pm.

This performance lecture is the first event by artist Andy Holden following his recent appointment to the Stanley Picker Fellowship programme, and marks the beginning of his research as it continues to develop over the coming months with the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture.

Performed earlier this year to accompany his solo exhibition at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape will take place at the Stanley Picker Gallery in a developed format, where wall projections and a soundtrack will animate the Gallery environment. For the event, Holden has produced a limited-edition of silk-screened posters, copies of which will be exhibited around the University.

Drinks reception from 5pm. Performance begins promptly at 6pm. All Welcome.

Watch the trailer of Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape here: http://www.stanleypickergallery.org/news/andy-holden-performance-lecture-30-nov/

*New date due to industrial action on Wednesday 30 November.

Two of our BA(Hons) Product and Furniture Design graduates and one BSc(Hons) Product Design graduate were featured in last month’s ‘Icon’ magazine graduate issue. Each year the renowned design and architecture publication lists 15 of the most promising young designers from up and down the country. This year only four listed were undergraduate, with Kingston taking three of those slots! The rest making up the 15 came from MA courses including the Royal College of Art. We’re very proud to see our students work being compared at this level. Congratulations to Ben Fursdon, Oscar Medley Whitfield and Hannah Niskanen Benady.

Martin Westwood These Hands Are Models:

Exhibition Launch at The Stanley Picker Gallery

5 October 2011

Stanley Picker Fellow Martin Westwood’s exhibition These Hands Are Models launches Wednesday 5 October from 6-8.30pm.

The exhibition, supported by the Henry Moore Foundation and running until 26 November 2011, constitutes a major installation of new ceramic pieces resulting from an 18 month period of research as part of the Stanley Picker Fellowship programme here at Kingston University.

Westwood initiated this new body of work following a residency at The British School at Rome researching the origins of money and currency. A further period of research at the European Ceramics Work Centre (EKWC) in Holland resulted in the development of ambitious large-scale ceramic pieces, with much of the work for the final exhibition produced within the specialist ceramic workshop facilities at the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture. The resulting installation of multiple elements locates itself somewhere between the factory-floor aspirations of mechanisation and the conspicuous-consumption of the executive environment.

These Hands Are Models is accompanied by a download-publication, available free from the Stanley Picker Gallery site, as well as an artist-edition, both designed with Fraser Muggeridge Studio and including a newly commissioned text by Steven Claydon. The publications will be launched on Friday 14 October 2011 coinciding with Frieze Art Fair.

Westwood is due to continue his involvement with the research culture here at Kingston University, commencing an AHRC-funded PhD with the Fine Art School’s Centre for Useless Splendour.

www.stanleypickergallery.org

Dr. Bernadette Blair was invited to attend, as a keynote speaker, the International Design Education Forum of South Africa (DEFSA) conference in Johannesburg this month.  The conference was held in the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture of the University of Johannesburg (UJ).  This was the 6^th DEFSA conference and was entitled ‘20/20 Design Vision’ celebrating the 20th year of this organization.  The conference was attended by delegates from many African countries and also other international institutions.

Bernadette’s presentation reflected on the last two decades where we have seen the designer’s role and brief broaden. She discussed how with the introduction of the personal computer, the Internet and wireless technology and social networking, designers /academics have experienced dramatic changes, especially in their rapport with space, time, the physicality of objects, and themselves as individuals. Her presentation focused on how, with the expansion in student numbers and a reducing resource in Higher Education, the studio-based design pedagogic community is responding and adapting its teaching and learning methodologies in response to these rapid developments and is effectively utilising feedback opportunities to inform curriculum and student’ understanding and equipping them for the profession they are entering.

Bernadette also toured FADA at UJ and discussed with academic staff and the dean of faculty  shared practice and developments.  Kingston’s reputation for art, design and architecture is well known.  The links made will be furthered by a visit from the Dean of FADA UJ to Kingston University later in the year and will hopefully lead to further opportunities for collaboration in the future.

Picture gallery of the conference can be viewed at

http://www.defsa.org.za/e107_plugins/autogallery/autogallery.php?show=2011_Conference

Research Degrees Open Event 

Tuesday 31 May 2011

The Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Kingston London, would like to invite prospective research degree applicants to an open event to find out more about Research Degrees in the Faculty and meet staff and students involved with the research degrees programme.

The Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture has a growing and vibrant research culture. The  research degrees programme consists of research and training and allows  students to develop their practice based skills, broaden their academic knowledge, expand their methodological skills and integrate those elements as independent  researchers. Our programmes are designed to meet the needs of continuing academics and candidates with established practices in art, design and the built environment interested in developing these in an academic environment.

There are research centres in:

Contemporary Art

Design

Real Estate

Modern Interiors

Visual and Material Culture

Details of AHRC and Kingston University funding will be presented at the Open Day. We are currently seeking applications within the following areas..

Art and Design:

• Contemporary Art;
• Digital Media and Communication Design;
• Product, Interior and Spatial Design; Fashion; Textiles;
• Environmental Design. 

Built Environment

• Architecture;
• Surveying and Planning;
• Sustainable Built Environment

History of Art, Architecture and Design

• Modern Interiors –  identity and the design of the modern interior; modernity, modernism and the interior; the tensions between interior decoration and interior design; representations of the modern interior; the reconstructed modern interior
• Visual and Material Culture – Historical and Critical Studies; Place, Space, and Global Futures; Gender, Technology, and the Human Image; Cultural Activism

3 pm – 5 pm, Main Lecture Theatre, Knights Park Campus, Grange Road, Kingston

Rsvp: fadaresearch-enterprise@kingston.ac.uk

Map: http://www.kingston.ac.uk/aboutkingstonuniversity/location/maps/documents/Kingston-Town-Centre.pdf

London’s creative industries have bounced back from the recession according to one of the city’s most influential designers.

Peter Bishop, who has just stood down as deputy chief executive of the London Development Agency, was speaking after being awarded an honorary doctorate by Kingston University. He describes himself not as a planner, but as a “shaper of cities”, having influenced the Canary Wharf development, the BBC’s White City Media Centre and the new development of King’s Cross. He also works as an adviser to the civic authorities in the Romanian capital Bucharest.

Mr Bishop received his honour from the University’s Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture in a ceremony at the Rose Theatre in Kingston. “Architecture and design touch the lives of all of us,” he told an audience of more than 700 students. “The cities that look after their public spaces, care about their new buildings and preserve their historic fabric will thrive. I’ve just attended a big property festival in Cannes and I came back feeling very positive about London. I’m confident it’ll continue to be a place where great designers are given the freedom to create great places.”

Peter Bishop set up Design for London, the Mayor’s architectural organisation in 2006. “Design for London has the luxury of being able to think about what makes the capital unique,” he said. “It devises big strategies for change and works with local communities to shape their neighbourhoods and improve people’s lives.”

The Head of Kingston’s School of Architecture and Landscape, Daniel Rosbottom, described the unique opportunity that Kingston’s architecture students have had in working with Design for London over the past two years on the East London Green Grid and High Street London. He said he is looking forward to the relationship continuing in years to come. “Under Peter’s leadership the students have really engaged with what architects do. They have benefited hugely from the opportunity to work with the key design strategists for London, allowing them to play a part in thinking about the future of our city, but equally, I know that Design for London have appreciated the breadth and innovation of their ideas and research.”

Mr Bishop said he hoped the honorary doctorate would enable him to build stronger links between academia and architects and designers currently working on projects in London. He had previously worked for four London Boroughs before moving to Design for London and, then, the London Development Agency. “I am working with the mayor on his design advisory council, have a book being published later this year called The Temporary City, I’ve taken on a directorship at an architects’ practice and am doing some university lecturing,” he said.

“I hate it when people ask me what I do for a living. I have to say ‘Well, have you got half an hour?’”

For further information please contact the Kingston University press office on 020 8417 3023 or press@kingston.ac.uk.

Kingston University’s Stanley Picker Gallery is to form part of Arts Council England’s new National Portfolio Funding programme from 2012, announced this week.

Gallery Director David Falkner says:

“We are very proud indeed that the Stanley Picker Gallery is one of the few new London venues to be included in Arts Council England’s upcoming funding programme.

This is great recognition for the work we have been doing over recent years, finding ways of supporting, promoting and attracting audiences for our challenging and experimental new commissions by some of the very best artists and designers working today.

This new funding is a real vote of support for our venue from Arts Council England, and fantastic news for all of the gallery’s local communities, including the students and staff who have us right here on site and are able to get directly involved in all our activities.

We are so excited that we have this amazing opportunity, especially given the present financial climate, to maintain the level of our programme and plan ahead with confidence.”

www.stanleypickergallery.org

Current Show “A Day in the Life of Ernesto Bones” by Stanley Picker Fellow Ab Rogers Design.