A couple of years ago, I wrote about "Le Clochard", a soft duvet cover printed with the photographic image of cardboard for that "homeless chic" look in the comfort of your own bedroom. In fact, a portion of the proceeds to an organization that benefits homeless youth in the Netherlands.
Now Le Clochard's designer, Peggy van Neer is back with Le Trottoir , her newest bedding design for SNURK, which takes the form of a percale cotton fitted sheet printed with concrete blocks. Now your homeless bedroom can be completely complete...and still benefit homeless youth.
Since we're in the Belgian stop animation mood, I thought I'd share this commercial for Belgian Natural Gas made by advertising behemoth TBWA. I'm not sure about natural gas heat being any "softer" than normal heat, but this animation sure did make me feel warm and fuzzly-wuzzly.
If you're into spoilers, check out the "making of" video (directly below the original commercial). It unmasks the tedium involved in stop animation, yet still manages to make the shoot seem like "Christmas on Walton's Mountain". I'm off to turn down my heat a few degrees and put on a sweater. Sorry, natural gas!
I've had to spend spring break alone in Eureka because Claire's away doing a visiting artist gig in at an international school in Brussels. She spent the past week collaborating with four fifth grad classes on this animation that uses recycled materials to underscore their Earth-friendly message.
I guess it's okay to share Claire with the children of Belgium....but I'm ready for her to come back.
When I was in New York last week, I had the good fortune to see Slash: Paper Under the Knife at the Museum of Art and Design. I'm hoping to give you a full report on that soon. In the meantime, my pal Henry sent me a link to an earlier project from Bryan Dettmer, one of the artists featured in that show.
For this project, Dettmer took old cassette tapes (metal tapes, natch!) and melted them into a skeleton sculpture that was displayed at the International Museum of Surgical Science called Postoperative, that also included his book autopsies. Dettmer is all about crazy detail and painstaking craft. The way he uses the bottoms of the cassette tapes for skull teeth is typical of his genius.
First, in the UK, The Guardian's magazine The Observer ran an amazing four-page article on The Baroness. I was fortunate enough to be interviewed for the article about her... and I even rated a mention in the sidebar, along with Betsy Greer, another close personal friend of Extreme Craft.
The Baroness also has a new Etsy store, where you can purchase her detourned ceramic objects. Reportedly, she has one of the biggest ceramic decal collections in the world. Keep an eye on the Etsy shop and her blog to see how they get used.
She's also curated a show at the Ink'd Gallery in Brighton called Renegade Potters and Extreme Craft that features a group of likeminded subversive crafters including Dan Baldwin and Paul Scott.
The Baroness' newest creation is a mosaic elephant that will accompany 199 other elephants that will take to the streets of London for The Elephant Parade this summer. The parade is similar to projects like Chicago's cows that have popped up all over the U.S. True to form, the Baroness is collaborating with Nick Reynolds of music group Alabama 3 (Sopranos theme song anyone?). The mosaic elephant will call attention to the plight of Indian elephants, whose population has dwindled from over 200,000 to less than 30,000 today.
Beneath the beautiful tiled exterior, an elephant skull will be peeking out. Like everything the Baroness touches, I'm sure Phoolan (that's the elephant's name) will be gorgeous, luring viewers in for a closer look at the seductive surface, then clobbering them over the head with a message they need to hear.
Stay tuned to The Baroness Carrie von Reichardt's blog for more details and video updates. I'll post an image when Phoolan is installed!
Like most bloggers, I've got a bazillion tabs open on my internet browser at any one time. Whenever I run across anything that I want to post to Extreme Craft or Readymade, I just open a tab and get back to it whenever I can. Unfortunately, some things wait and wait for me to post them, but I never find the inspiration or the right moment to do it.
One such thing is this YouTube clip of Arthur van Poppel, a very committed, very talented... perhaps very disturbed one-man-band from the Netherlands. You might already know him from such Dutch Television shows as "Man bijt hond
" and "Hart von Nederland". Mr. van Poppel came into my radar about a month ago when I ran across a story about his musical/mechanical creations, which seem to be spiraling out of control! Witness the above photo of his "Nautilus", a modified steampunk golf cart-cum-Captain Nemo pleasurecraft that allows him to play any number of instruments while making fire shoot out the back.
There's also The Music Car--the hot pink pussy magnet featured above. The Music Car actually includes a scissor lift that lifts Mr. van Poppel, Garth Brooks-like, high above the city streets of the Dutch towns he busks in.
Talented as he is, like most Dutch street performers, Mr. van Poppel loooooooves him some John Denver. You can find other clips on YouTube of him performing a version of "Take Me Home, Country Road" that will have you tapping your wooden shoes.
His whole schtick is super endearing. Check out how Mr. van Poppel stays abreast of trends. His Music Car is decorated in that hot-pink and confetti color scheme that Urban Outfitters' color scientists have spent the past few years working out. The Nautilus is going to have crushed velvet clad steampunks clamoring for more John Denver. I wish he was my crazy uncle (Dutch uncle?).
I'm actually posting this right now to attempt to purge him from my consciousness. Every time I restart my browser, the YouTube clip at the top of this post automatically loads and plays his version of "If I Had a Hammer", complete with his little "doodle-oodle-oodle-oodle-oodly-doo" yodeling bit.
I'm closing that tab now...and spreading my sickness to the rest of you. Mission accomplished.
This body of work was created during a Summer 2010 residency at the Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen, China. These porcelain vessels explore traditional Chinese iconography as refracted through a decidedly Western point of view.
