We met at MadLab again this month, which continues to be an ideal venue. More people attended this time too so we over ran a bit but that didn’t seem to be a problem and there was another group still using part of the building when we left; good to know for the future if numbers increase at any point!
James Pashley began by sharing some display sheets from his recent MA submission. These suggested opportunities for play in various urban settings including city centres and residential streets. James’ work is based on research into Mitsuru Senda (amongst others) and especially references Senda’s work on ‘circulatory play systems’ as methods of facilitating play. James attempts to show that these don’t have to be restricted to parks and can be found in existing urban environments. Discussion moved on to the potential future development of the work, which as well as a desire to design a new website and business card includes a joint mapping project in Manchester that would seek to identify existing play opportunities and communicate these in a format suitable for distribution through tourist information points. That is if he doesn’t fly off to teach in Japan first! |  James and Juan review business card inspiration |
I then received a lot of constructive criticism for a two further mock-ups that I generated in the on-going development of a This Place Is Book (see last month’s entry). The discussion raised a lot of questions, possibilities and considerations which will take some time to fully digest but a key point was that in its current format it is not quite striking the right balance between seeking personal insights and factual accounts from participants and that this needs reviewing, though the best way to achieve this is not instantly obvious. It was then suggested that group members could each take a copy of the distributed mock-ups to complete as a ‘dummy run’ in order to try and generate a better idea of what changes to make. This was of course a really helpful suggestion so I am looking forward to seeing the contributions from the group as well as the feedback on the project that will be inherent in those.
 group members; mid discussion  | James Sharp shared some very positive updates on his practice which has recently seen his work accepted by 5 galleries and craft shops around the UK. He has found that targeting his hand made journals to specific places is popular with curators and identifies this as key to increasing his exhibition and sales opportunities. This led indirectly to an interesting discussion about the differences between ‘Art’, ‘Design’ and ‘Craft’ which could probably have taken up the entire evening in itself but we agreed that whilst creating boundaries between disciplines isn’t always helpful, ‘Design’ is generally concerned with a justifiable or measurable outcome while ‘Art’ tends to be a bit freer and ‘Craft’ takes a position somewhere in between the two. Apologies if I have over-simplified that bit of the discussion! We were also joined this month by Juan Armellini, Kevin Linnane and Christine Wilcox-Baker who contributed to the discussions but did not specifically bring projects this time. We did however hear a brief yet tantalising introduction to Christine’s work since her MA in Art and Landscape and a hint from Kevin that there may be some photographs from Winter Solstice at Stonehenge to see in the near future so I’m certainly looking forward to reporting more on those projects in the next update! I ended on a quick introduction to the tool I use to build my (this!) website, www.weebly.com. Whilst I’m aware there are many ways to go about getting a site live these days these aren’t always as intuitive as one might hope so hopefully that served to clarifiy one or two things in some areas at least. It was certainly a good opportunity to test out the MadLab Wifi and projector; another good reason why I hope to organise the next meeting in the same space soon so check back in the next couple of weeks for the next confirmed date! |
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