Stanley Picker Gallery

Combining the exertion of physical endurance with the intimacy of the performed act, Jordan McKenzie’s working practice intersects the lines between performance, installation and sculpture to investigate dialogues between the processes and production of drawing.

Concerned with how the body is articulated through the medium of performed drawing, McKenzie uses mark-making as a way of mapping the body within architectural form, the drawings emerging through the process of navigating, tracing and documenting his physical movements through a given space.

Untitled: At Length brought together in one exhibition a series of video works and related sculptural objects emerging from recent performance pieces at diverse locations around the UK. Each individual work related to a specific length of his body which he used to determine the scale and scope of his actions and the resulting objects.

The formal nature of the sculptural works, the combined videos and the cacophony of soundtracks, challenged preconceptions of how drawing is employed and perceived as both a material and a physical process to describe and define our experience of architectural space and other landscapes.

Other recent exhibitions and live events by McKenzie include Spacex (Exeter); Wimbledon Centre for Drawing: Tramway (Glasgow) and Ikon (Birmingham).

A significant and highly influential figure in the worlds of fashion and collaborative practice, Shelley Fox is one of a rare breed of modern fashion designers renowned for her innovative use of materials, manipulation of fabric and the development of unorthodox pattern cutting. Her work explores unusual and arresting themes, on both technical and conceptual levels. Scorched felted wool and burnt cotton bandaging, the use of laser beams and sound waves that strike the cloth with ‘invisible heat’, negative imagery printed onto fabric, the use of Braille markings on boiled wool and her designs incorporating Morse Code are all examples of her innovative working practice.

Developed as part of Fox’s Stanley Picker Fellowship in Design at the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Kingston University, Philadelphia Florist was inspired by a set of 1937-39 diaries found on a New York flea market. The diaries provide a rich visual and written record of a Philadelphia florist’s business of high society weddings, funerals, debutant ceremonies, high profile sports, political and social events. The celebration, remembrance and the marking of occasions through the symbolism of flowers formed the starting point of the new collection.

The individual outfits in Philadelphia Florist, each named after rose hybrids such as ‘Showgirl’, ‘Commonwealth’ or ‘Brilliant’, were inspired by the dissections of botanical drawings. Displayed along a spine of coat-hooks as if left by their wearers, they reflected in their quality and finish the Philadelphia high-society that the Florist himself would have once served. The original diaries were themselves dissected, their pages and cuttings attached carefully to the gallery walls with dress-making pins.

Conceptually linking the exhibition with contemporary forms of digital-diary such as personal blogs and webcasts, Fox’s first website  is launched to coincide with the exhibition. The site consists of an online archive covering more than 10 years of fashion collections, films, exhibitions and ongoing research projects. The site showcases her new collection Philadelphia Florist together with the full range of her previous design practice, as well as many of her seminal collaborative projects including those with Nick Knight’s Showstudio, Random Dance, Tomato, Michael Clark and Scanner. Designed by the award winning web team at digit the site promotes a rich understanding of how fashion designers research and develop their ideas and how clothing can be dynamically presented outside of the catwalk arena.

Within the orbit of Greater London, Kingston University’s satellite location affords it both the close proximity of vibrant city life and the tranquillity of its immediate suburban environment.

London Orbital coincided with the 2006 Graduate Degree Shows. Exhibitors included a network of leading practitioners whose own professional orbits bring them to Kingston from cities as near and far as London, Manchester, New York and Tokyo. As Lecturers, Research Fellows, PhD Students and Visiting Professors they each contribute to the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture’s strong reputation for visual, material and spatial research practice. In this exhibition they offered their unique perspectives on issues relating to the design, habitation, transit, work and leisure of urban and suburban living. Mapping forms of contact between people, material and place, their diverse practices are informed by and engaged with patterns of behaviour in city life, from public transport and café-culture, to domesticity and art world etiquette.

ArtLab (Cullinan + Richards) have exhibited widely in the UK and internationally including solo shows at Mobile Home and INIVA in London, Caltech, Los Angeles and the Schnitt Ausstellungsraum in Cologne. They currently lecture on the MA Art & Space programme at Kingston University. For London Orbital they produced a large photographic billboard piece related to a performance project in Cyprus.

Martina Bramkamp teaches on both the BA and MA programmes across Illustration, Animation and Graphic Design. She was part of the curating team of the Lomo Gallery in London and has worked as organiser and judge on Lomographic events in London, Tokyo and Vienna. Here she displayed a selection of dog lomos, carried out over a seven year period.

Rachel Davies was Associate Artist at The Place in 2002 and is currently a Researcher in Design at Kingston University. In 2005 she won the IMZ Dance Screen Grand Prix for her short film GOLD. Her next major project is due to premiere as part of the Manchester International Festival in 2007. She is now the John Thaw Research Fellow at Manchester University. Freefall in the Moment of Perpetual Accident was a collaboration with artist Barnaby Stone.

John Elson, Director of Jedco product designers (est. 1984), lectures in Product & Furniture Design at Kingston University. In 1997 he designed this solar-powered illuminated bus stop for TfL London Buses upgraded in 2005 and currently on trial in South London.

Geoff Grandfield, Head of Illustration and Animation. Alongside a number of new publishing projects, Grandfield develops these daily illustrations for The Times newspaper on his commute from central London. In 2001 he was commended by the National Art Library Illustration Awards for his illustrations for The Novels of Raymond Chandler, published by The Folio Society.

Pablo Helguera is a Mexican-born artist living and working in New York. He has exhibited worldwide and is currently visiting professor for MA Curating Contemporary Design at Kingston University. A Pablo Helguera Manual of Contemporary Art Style was launched at the Geffrye Museum in London in 2005 and was published in English in July 2006.

David Lawrence – acting Director of Design Research at Kingston University – is a regular contributor to radio programmes, research seminars and workshops. His recent works include studies of London Underground’s architecture and London Transport’s corporate identity. Here he presented a model from his forthcoming project exploring the life and culture of roadside dining establishments.

Simon Maidment is Director of Sam Design Ltd and has exhibited his work extensively, including the Crafts Council and the Design Museum London. In 2001 he was awarded the Peugeot Design Award for ceramic and glass. Recently appointed Head of BA Product & Furniture Design, his urban bird box – Tweeter – was a collaborative project with fellow designers Carl Clerkin, William Warren and Gitta Gschwendtner.

Jordan McKenzie’s work explores drawing and other processes of mark making in relation to the human body. He has exhibited throughout the UK and Europe and currently lectures on the BA Live Arts programme at Kingston University. For London Orbital he presented a new series of drawings produced whilst traveling on the London Underground system.

Louis Nixon’s film Rolling Barrel was produced in 2001. He has exhibited worldwide including the 10th Biennial of Visual Arts in Pancevo, Serbia and Whitechapel Project Space in London. He is currently acting Head of Fine Art at Kingston University.

Alexandra Stara has been involved in a number of wide-ranging research projects with themes relating to contemporary architecture and the city. For London Orbital she produced Ars Memorative Urbana, an exploration of memory and journey. She designed and now directs MA Architecture: Thinking Building at Kingston University.

Deyan Sudjic is architecture critic for The Observer and visiting professor at the Royal College of Art. He was Director of the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2002 and is author of 100-Miles City, Architecture Pack, and monographs on John Pawson, Ron Arad and Richard Rogers. For many years he edited Domus magazine and for a period was Dean of the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture. He is now Director of the Design Museum in London.

Maiko Tsutsumi’s Scratch-Marked Tables form the practice-based element of her current PhD at Kingston University; The Poetics of Everyday Objects: An investigation into the embodiment of meanings in domestic objects. The work created for her MA Furniture Design (RCA) has been exhibited internationally and she currently works for Tomoko Azumi’s TNA Design Studio.

In the film Being John Malkovich the main characters discover a portal to enter the consciousness of John Malkovich the actor, who plays a parody of his real self. After each “being John Malkovich” experience – lasting exactly 15 minutes – each entrant is unceremoniously dumped on the New Jersey Turnpike, just outside New York City. In the film, the turnpike symbolises the return to the everyday from an experience that has allowed various disfunctional characters to spend fifteen minutes in the mind of the famous actor, attempting to use that position to control and manipulate each other’s lives.

The Kingston Turnpike considers the process of making an exhibition as like that of creating a portal through which artists act out their own desires and concerns for their work and its audience. The resulting interaction between these diverse artworks – and categories of artwork – is emphasised as part of a fluid process that the curator can initiate but not ultimately control or conclude. In this way, the works of art in the space interact with each other in ways that cannot always be prescribed or predicted. The visitor’s experience of the artworks presented becomes grounded in the particular architecture of the exhibition space and the process of transit by which each person arrives at the gallery.

The title of the exhibition, therefore, reflects a starting point rather than imposing a set of defined criteria and objectives, the intention being that proposing to work without curatorial strategies can sometimes be more interesting than working with them?

Curated by Andrew Bick, Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture, Kingston University. Organised by Turnpike Gallery, supported by Wigan Leisure and Culture Trust, Arts Council England and Kingston University.

The Kingston Turnpike 40-page catalogue is available with texts from Jennifer Thatcher, Andrew Bick and Martyn Lucas.

Roberto (39) and Elba (3) are playing hide and seek:
– Daddy where are you?
Roberto is hiding under a blanket in the living room
– I am in the book
Elba picks up a story book from the floor and looks eagerly through the pages
– Where are you? I can’t find you!
– I am in the book
– Yes, but which page are you in?

For Elba the space inside the book is as real as the room they are playing in. How would it feel to perceive the world in this way? And what would this mean?

Children do not see the world confined to our reality, they live in a world were boundaries have not yet been defined. A world where imagination, dreams and space are one; where make believe is reality.

At the centre of El Ultimo Grito’s working practice is the desire to challenge perceptions and understandings of the world around us by investigating the relationship between man, object and space. Make Believe offered the opportunity to explore an alternative reality, defined by the individual and not by the forces of consumer markets. The research project comprised three distinct areas of their practice:

Micos was a collection of sculptural objects that challenged the rationale behind design for children. Children could explore the objects as an aid to play by defining physical functions they could perform, or by creating their own associations and stories around the objects through intellectual engagement.

Tagged Environments investigated the use of graffiti as a three-dimensional form of intervention in both domestic and public environments: DIY (Design-It-Yourself) versus mass market. This section was divided into two themes, the first looking at space and the second focusing on the object: Space Intervention explored the potential of 3-D graffiti to transform our immediate space to fit our personal needs. The project revealed archaeological layers of waste, incorporating products into a new material that raised important questions about such objects and our personal attachment to them. Design It Yourself Object proposed a radical new process for the production of three-dimensional design. Using simple adhesive-tape to bind readily available materials, the items produced ranged from furniture to purely narrative objects. As all Design It Yourself Objects were created in response to the specific needs and sensibilities of the individual, they presented viable alternatives to the standardised ‘finish’ of more formally resolved design objects.

Understanding design as an approach to life, El Ultimo Grito (“All the Rage“) translate and integrate this experience into their work through independent research projects, with core outcome as free-standing exhibitions and publications, that ultimately feed their design work for the commercial world; ranging from furniture, clothing, accessories, to interiors and exhibition design. Founded in 1997 by Spanish-born Kingston alumna Rosario Hurtado and her partner Roberto Feo, they were nominated in 2004 for the prestigious Jerwood Applied Arts Prize in Furniture and are currently exhibiting in Import/Export at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. They developed their first ever book project alongside their installation of new work for the Stanley Picker Gallery.

El Ultimo Grito were the Award Winners of the London Design Medal 2012