Cathy's Art Diary

Interesting talk at Charleston Farmhouse as part of the Charleston Festival bringing together Tristram Hunt, Director of the V&A, and Amanda Levete, the architect of the museums new extension. Hunt began by talking about the history of the museum and the area to place this new extension in context. He also talked about previous ideas for the development and how the current design was chosen.   Levete then took over to talk about the thinking behind the design and how it aims to taking the energy from the street and bringing it into the museum space blurring the boundary between museum and street. She talked about how they had to dig a basement 20m deep while the rest of the museum, full of delicate objects, stayed open.      There was a fascinating discussion between them at the end and some good Q&As from the audience, most of whom seemed to have visited the new extension. I loved Levete’s answer to one question about what she’d have done if...

Excellent talk at Charleston Farmhouse as part of their literature festival with Edmund de Waal talking about the research for his most recent Book “The White Road: a pilgrimage of sorts”. The book was about his passion from porcelain and his journey to look at its origins. He talked about how he’d been thinking about why objects matter which lead him to scribble notes on a walk which turned into the journey and book. The whole talk was a series of wonderful stories which you wanted to know more about. The talk was so good my notes were odd words and sentences badly written on my ticket so this blog post is a bit of a journey in itself to piece it together! He talked passionately about being in China and realising he was looking at a landscape of porcelain but also talked about the conditions in the factories. Then there was a wonderful mad section on Augustus II and the alchemist Böttger working to produce porcelain in Europe. Then talk of good old Josiah Wedgewood i...