Tuesday 31 May 2011

Citta Slow

I am currently lucky enough to be in Tuscany, home of the Slow Food and thus the Slow movement.  Tomorrow I will be visiting Slow Cities (www.cittaslow.net) and exploring the Slow lifestyle on a grander scale, ahead of my clockless experiment next week!  I will be going to Massa Marittima, Suvereto and Sassetta... will post photos asap and my thoughts on whether the Slow cities seem any different - to me, a Londoner, everywhere is seeming pretty slow at the moment - Tuscany definitely has a different pace to London!

Monday 23 May 2011

Favourite Tools!

 Dstel's most used tools - coffee, cake, scalpel, cutting mat, chisels, desk, pen and lino... in no particular order!
Coffee & cake = essentials, cutting mat - borrowed, chisels - a gift, pen and lino - bought.
Favourite - lino
Most used - lino
Is a desk a tool?

I would like to make a collection of images and statements of your favourite or most used tools (or both).  Please either comment here, tweet me @bhmakes with the hashtag #mostusedtools or email me on bridget@bridgetharvey.co.uk and give me an image and a few words about the tools or tools in question - favourite or most used, how often you use them, what for, where did they come from or anything else you want to tell me!

Thank you

#mostusedtools
bridget@bridgetharvey.co.uk


Friday 20 May 2011

Wonder HIll HIgh Market

Dstel and I will be at the Wonder Hill High Market tomorrow from 11-5, come and see us!  It's on Snowsfield Road at The Miller.  Nearest station is London Bridge.

Thursday 19 May 2011

Thingness

 

I am very excited to be going to the Thingness symposium at Camberwell College of Art on Thursday 26th.  

Wednesday 18 May 2011

Slow Design Framework video


Slow Design STEER theory from bridget harvey on Vimeo.

New ideas

Another look at textiles in jewellery, I am also making some similar wooden pieces to this although these ideas a very experimental at the moment.

Monday 16 May 2011

Clockless Experiment

I am about to embark on an experiment on how time affects me and my making, and it's influence on my self and my body.

I often feel that the time-keeps which surround me have a stronger hold on me than I would like.  I always set an alarm although I wake before it most days, I rush and worry about what time it is, am aware of the clock even when I cannot see one.  I want to see what my life would be like if I stripped conscious time from it.

I intend to spend one week (Monday to Friday) with time keeping implements and one week (monday to Friday) without. I will record my feelings and experiences in a journal fashion daily, and also against a series of more tangible criteria such as work achieved etc.

During the with-time week I will keep a note of when I check the clock, the actions I use clocks for (catching trains etc, alarms), how I use it in regard to my making and my general living.

During the time-less week I will remove as far as possible any connection with time keeping devices (clocks, watches etc) and turn of the clock functions on my phone and computer etc. I will not be using an alarm clock or anything similar.  I will rise when I wake, eat when hungry, work as feels natural etc.

I will be tweeting about my experiences, using the hashtag #clockless and blogging about my experiences here, tagged clockless.

I will measure somewhat tangible things like work done, emotions etc to try to see what difference the week I spend without time has to a normal week.  I will also try to discover as much as possible about other peoples time experiences and experiments, so if you know of anything please let me know.

Caveats:
I am doing this Monday to Friday as I often have markets stalls at the weekends and must be there at certain times (a useful side of clocks?)
My partner will have to set his alarm to make sure he gets up for work.  However I usually wake before him (and his alarm) so I am not concerned about this disturbing things.

With-time week:  6th-10th June
Clockless week: 13th-17th June

Helvetica Clock - "A time-full tribute to a timeless font"


For font aficionados and those of us who geek about time, and those who happily do both.  An irreverent clock for your time based enjoyment.

Saturday 7 May 2011

Utopia

This is quite an interesting discussion on Utopia.  Laurie Taylor talks to Professor Russell Jacoby, Professor Ash Amin, Professor Barbara Graziosi and The Bishop of Whitby, Martin Warner about the future of Utopias and our imaginations.

Friday 6 May 2011

My studio!

We are having an open studio this wekend.  The private view was last night and this is part of my space, all spick and span!  We are open 10-2 today and 10-4 tomorrow if you fancy a visit - 178 a Glyn Road, E5.

Wednesday 4 May 2011

Affective Craft

 A while ago I wrote about a talk I had heard by Glen Adamson (see here for the original post) and his thoughts on the word affect and on affective craft.  Then yesterday I came across this article by Scott Geiger via twitter which had the following definition in it:

 Affect
Sensory performance ascribed to a building or space. Some contemporary architecture appeals to the senses through pattern, materiality, light—what times past would have called “ornament” before it was starved from architecture by modernism. Affect resists interpretation. It bears no message. Instead, affect conveys a resonance between space and program, building and site, surface and sunlight. The screen facade of the New Museum in New York City, for example, affects mutability: the building looks either rugged or diaphanous depending on the time of day, quality of light, and your perspective from the street.
Read on: The Function of Ornament by Farshid Moussavi; “Ornament and Crime” by Adolf Loos.



The qualities described above apply just as aptly as in Adamson's explanation and they both refer to Adolf Loos.   
'Sensory performance ascribed to a building or space' is an intriguing way of thinking about the affect of ones work - if you were to translate that to your own pieces (in my case jewellery) what sensory effect would it give?

Monday 2 May 2011

A bit of thinking

One arrangement of the thoughts I was having after re-reading parts of Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft (otherwise known as The Case for Working with your Hands), a bit more David Pye and listening to Richard Sennett and David Gauntlett on the radio yesterday.  I have arranged this in a variety of ways - flickr link to come - and this is by no means the end of my post-it notes and ideas on the subject, but for me at the moment the main questions are as follows:

Are modern methods of sharing (you tube tutorials etc) any less valid than traditional master/apprenticeship tutorials?

Is physical making more valid than out souring ones making, and just having the idea or concept yourself?

By valid I mean does it hold less value (emotional, financial, experiential)?

There are obviously things that one cannot get from videos or online picture tutorials, similarly to learning from a book, that you do get with a master teacher, learning directly from an expert, but is that due to the lack of skill with which we use the resources (could we make our video tutorials more detailed for example) (idea discussed by Richard Sennett on R4 show, Thinking Allowed)

Is an idea or concept any less of a made thing than a physical object?  Does the skill of the outsourced maker lie in not adding their own personality to the object they have been asked to make?

Many many questions sparked off by these heard conversations and read ideas.   More to follow on this.

Sunday 1 May 2011

David Gauntlett and Richard Sennett on radio4

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b010mrzc

Thinking Allowed hosts David Gauntlett and Richard Sennett talking about making and connecting, traditional craftsmanship and the internet.