Project: The Meal
I responded to the Art House Co-op’s first annual global snack project, called The Meal, which the team in New York, based at Brooklyn Art Library, described in a few simple but beautiful words as “One moment. One meal. Let’s eat”. The team had asked thousands of people around the world to participate in a simultaneous meal with strangers, which took place on 24th Feb 2012 at 12pm EST. The team had also said that the aim of the project was to encourage the artists to “take a moment from our hectic lives” in order “to inspire a feeling of community across geographic and cultural boundaries”, while addressing the statement “you are what you eat”. The slogan “what you eat” is never enough for nearly a billion people around the world and the project is, therefore, a call for our awareness of the growing problem in the struggle against global hunger.
My piece is called London Meal as I have lived in London (UK) for over 20 years. As London is ahead of New York for 5 hours, it meant that my meal had to be prepared for a traditional British afternoon tea at 5pm (GMT), to be eaten with a cup of British style tea rather than with a can of Coca-Cola as in New York. To emphasise the concept of the multi-cultural and global event, I, therefore, decided to test my technical – culinary – skills that I learnt in my mother’s kitchen in Slovenia. I also thought that such a global collaborative event had to be documented differently, not directly associated with the cooking skills of Slovenia, but by applying a valuable skill of hand-made lettering, I have ‘acquired’ it in London while attending a pioneering course on experimental typography at the University of the Arts. The course reopened endless thoughts and searches on how one can make use of any traditional technical skill for a project and recycle it in another context to give it a new meaning.
I first prepared yeast dough, used traditionally in Slovenia at the carnival and at other special occasions, which needed to rise. I then created letter templates for letters based on Helvetica. Once I cut out the letters from the dough, the letters had to rise again. They were then deep-fried, drained from oil and decorated with icing sugar.
All photos were shown in an exhibition documenting the world’s largest communal snack on 5 April 2012 at Brooklyn Art Library.
Sketchbook Project 2012: Stitches and Folds
I decided again this year to participate in the Sketchbook Project 2012, the main project out of many run by the Art House Co-op based at The Brooklyn Art Library in New York. This year nearly 20,000 of sketchbooks will be exhibited in 14 cities across North America, and for the first time this year, in London for contributors from Europe and in Melbourne if the artist resides in Australia.
For the details of the Project Overview, see the post about last year’s Fiction Sketchbook. The only difference between this and the fiction one is that with this project, you did not have to tell the story in text. You are free to develop your theme.
The theme I picked this time is Stitches and Folds. The entire sketchbook was folded and stitched. I folded the pages inwards, starting from the middle of the sketchbook, with the first two pages folded so that the outer edges met the gutter. I then folded each page, with the size of each fold decreasing in equal increments towards each end of the book. I then added various papers under each fold, stitching folds and papers together each time with a different kind of stitch and at a random pace, using threads varying in thickness and colour.
For images of all other pages of this Sketchbook Project, click Flickr. Here are some examples.
The tour starts in April, and we shall welcome the sketchbooks in London this October.
Brooklyn, NY Apr 14–30Brooklyn Art Library
103A N. 3rd St
Brooklyn, NY 11249 Chicago, IL May 3–5 Hyde Park Art Center 5020 S. Cornell Avenue Chicago, IL 60615 Portland, OR May 11–13 The Cleaners at the Ace Hotel 1022 SW Stark St Portland, OR Vancouver, Canada May 15–16 W2 Media Cafe 111 W Hastings St. Vancouver, BC Los Angeles, CA May 24–26 iam8bit 2147 W. Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, CA San Francisco Bay Area Jun Pop-Up Library Greater Boston Area Jul 6–8 LynnArts 25 Exchange Street Lynn, MA Portland, ME Jul 11–14 SPACE Gallery 538 Congress Street Portland, ME 04101 Toronto, Canada Jul 18–22 The Gladstone Hotel 1214 Queen St. W Toronto, ON Philadelphia, PA Aug 23–25 The Painted Bride co-presented with InLiquid 230 Vine Street Philadelphia, PA 19106 Atlanta, GA Aug 29–Sep 1 MASS Collective 364 Nelson St. SW Atlanta, GA Austin, TX Sep 8–16 Co-Lab Project Space 613 Allen St. Austin, TX London, England Oct Canada Water Library co-presented with The Albany and Southwark Council 21 Surrey Quays Rd. London, SE16 Melbourne, Australia Nov 10–21 NGV Studio Federation Square Russell & Flinders Sts Melbourne
Today’s Olympic Logo – Day No. 206
My contribution of 5 doughnuts to the Olympic Logo a Day 206 project led by Sarah Hyndman, a Creative Director of With Relish.
The doughnuts are traditionally eaten in Slovenia during the carnival period. These doughnuts on the plate have already been eaten since yesterday was the last day of the carnival!
Random Project 2012: Happy Anniversary Queen Liz
It’s 60 years today since The Queen ascended to the throne and the Random Project created some postcards to commemorate this event – the words picked were “Queen”, “Jubilee” and “Diamond” (the postcard below is a response to the word “Queen”).
The Random Project shows a growing collection of postcards. The postcards were originally first shown in an exhibition of typographically led work held as part of the London Design Festival in 2006. The exhibition showed experimental projects based on randomly selected words from Time Out. My word in the Random show, beautiful, is pivotal in the novel A Day in Spring (1953) by Slovene writer Ciril Kosmač (1910-1980). The author, who spent many years in exile, suffuses his prose with nostalgia and a sense of longing for his native landscape. The postcard Drink from the original show was then further exhibited as part of the Great British Design? conference at St Bride’s Library in London (2007).
A large number of creatives worldwide have since contributed their postcards to the project including Alan Kitching, Alan Rickman, Ed Fella and Stefan Sagmeister to name but a few.
The 2012 Project celebrates the spirit of London during the year in which the city is hosting the Olympic Games 2012. Each postcard is thus designed in response to a randomly picked word relating to either 2012, London or the Olympics.
The project is open to everyone of all ages, creatives or non-creatives. If you are interested in joining in and create a postcard, please click here to find out how to participate.
Have fun!
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