recovering

A huge thank you to all those who made it to the Scottish Book Trust last Friday for the ensemble installation. Those behind the event were thrilled the Speckled network held up, while some of the jewellery needs a little reinforcing if it is to survive future outings....

I am in the middle of analysing how people played around with these objects and reacted to the sounds, and already have ideas for refining the work, and for taking it in new directions.

Mike Byrne has done a wonderful job of documenting the evening, and his images can be seen in Sarah Kettley's ensemble set on Flickr. We are lucky to have got Mike for studio shots of the work too, so do visit this site again for those again soon.

Ensemble has now officially been accepted as an exhibition proposal at the New Craft Future Voices conference in Dundee this July, which will of course give us the chance to gather more user feedback and develop the work further. It will be a great opportunity to meet a whole bunch of new users for the work!

Finally, although this is just about the end of the ensemble project, I suspect the blog will remain as a store of jewellery related snippets, and with any luck it will soon be pointing you to new projects and strange objects.

ensemble installation event

ensemble - almost there

It will all have been worth it when you turn up and play with this stuff - and we will have experts on hand to ease you into the weird and wonderful worlds of experimental wearable technology and contemporary jewellery....

The installation of ensemble will mark the end of this project, with possible further showings at New Craft, Future Voices, the Six Cities Design Festival, and perhaps a cool retail site cum gallery in Glasgow - all to be confirmed. But this is the important one, because what you, the audience, do with the work here will inform our thinking for the next batch of crazy making.

Thanks to those who came along to the movement workshop in November, your input was invaluable, and of course to all those who donated their stories. I have really enjoyed developing the work around these contributions.

Some of the first round of pieces from the movement workshop, plus the first completed computational pieces, were exhibited at the Art School of the Australian National University (ANU) during ANAT's reSkin lab throughout January this year (left), and related developmental work has been shown at the Museum of Culture in Kyoto and is also currently in submission to be shown at Visual Art Scotland's annual exhibition in Edinburgh (below).

The research team are working hard on both the report to the AHRC, and on a clutch of papers for selected conferences and workshops - wish us luck!

While I'm here, I want to thank Frank and Vangelis in particular for all their hard graft in making this come together - here's to our big evening!

remembering reskin

Strange things happened out there. Rapunzel came to town for a short while, here being modeled by Michael - I did warn him...and now folk are back at work in their own environments wondering in what ways the experience is going to have changed their lives. The weather was grand for a Scot - limb loosening warmth from the word go - although recent pictures show mad hail storms and slush drifts that we'd be more used to in Auld Reekie.

Anyway, it's time to write the report and thank the SAC for funding me, and ANAT for inviting me. The piece I made while there (see below) is hopefully now part of the Visual Arts Scotland Show at the RSA on the Mound, Edinburgh, and I'm really looking forward to developing this line of work as soon as I get the chance - hello dorkbot? In the meantime you should definitely check out the reskin blog and lots of stuff on flickr - take a look at the very cool prototype section for everone's wonderful work.

Stille

‘Stille’ is a neckpiece which explores the boundary between intimate space and public performance. It attempts to capture that moment when we gather ourselves, perhaps find some kind of inner space, before a performative event.

The formal emphasis on texture and multiple elements is decorative, inviting attention, and yet the colours are subdued, allowing the wearer to downplay the extravagance of the piece. Colours and patterns have been inspired by a first visit to Australia, drawing on the Owl Eye Moth, gum tree barks and grasses, while the concept itself began with the flight of a Rosella overhead, and that momentary flash of brilliant colour – a shockingly bright event across the dryness of the surrounding land.

Sounds were collected over the course of the project, new sounds to this visitor from Scotland, like the birds calling first thing in the morning; and the many sounds of water, from the drainpipes on the single day of rain we’ve had in the last three weeks, to the surf and cicadas of Kaiola. These have in turn inspired the sounds that are available to the wearer as they roll their head to the front and sides; we are so used to the notion of surround sound as something large scale and imposing – here in contrast it is an intimate event.