Hayward Gallery

The New Decor exhibition at the Hayward Gallery provided my dose of culture this week. Similar to the Psycho Buildings exhibition last year, the gallery had asked artists for their take on interior design, and the result was spectacular; familiar household objects warped out of context, challenging the viewer to explore the way they interact and percieve the building blocks of day to day life. After loading myself with a coffee in the cafe, I spent an inspiring afternoon exploring installations, most of which looked like the psycho cousins of the trendy furniture shops on Marlybone High St, and ranged from humourous to dark narrative explorations of alienation. One of the standout pieces for me was a light sculpture based on a Bridget Riley composition, an interesting hommage that reimagined the visual illusion of the Riley piece in 3D, using blown glass and pulsing light sources.

  Bridget Riley is one of the pioneers of Op Art, utilising and playing with the basic mechanisms of human sight perception to create strange and sometimes uncomfortable optical illusions. Her work is well represented at most of the Tate group of galleries, and is worth taking the time to see at full scale. In the Piece below 'Movement in Squares' Riley uses black and white geometric patterns to fool our eyes into seeing movement and shapes that do not exist.

This work touches on many apects of science, including geometric shapes, and also deeper ideas about how our eyes percieve shape and forms. In essence the piece above is a much more sophisticated version of the Rubin's Vase, both play with our ability to only see one colour or another as the background.

On my way out of the gallery I also noticed these lamps in the shop;

These 'lab lights' recently won a design award for best new light design, which fascinated me. The visual language of scientific equipment emerging into a field such as lamp design is an interesting way in which the design world has specifically been influenced by the visual world of science. As I have said in previous posts, I think science offers an interesting and unique visual language that invites its own type of narrative exploration. In the same way that the Hayward Gallery exhibition invited artists to reimagine the world of interior design, an exhibition of scientific equipment reimagined by artists would surely invoke interesting interpretations of what science means to society as a whole, outside of the scientific community.

I Fold

I was recently rather enchanted by the buildings of Japanese Architect Tadao Ando, whos designs at first glance seem incredibly cold and sparse, but on further inspection reveal a masterful interplay of ratio and space, creating expressive buildings that excentuate and invite exploration of the spaces contained within them. The japanese style of these wonderful buildings reminded me of the Shinto shrines I visited on a trip to Tokyo a few years ago; these traditional structures seem to blend into the surrounding woodland, and through the use of gentle lighting and paper dividing screens, both exude a peaceful spiritual feeling, and at the same time, invite the visitor to invent a narrative around the minimal but perfect interiors. I am always amazed at the power of paper as a building material, and the inventive ways it is used in Japanese, Korean and other oriental style structures.
  I was rather delighted then to find that physicist Robert Lang has made a scientific discipline of the ancient art of paper folding, Origami. This is not a main post, so I am just going to link to an article in the new yorker that explains Langs fascination with the ancient art, however I find this a particularly inspiring example of the way maths can be used to create sculptures, which are even more spellbinding when you consider are folded froma single sheet of paper.

Article on Robert Lang in the New Yorker

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