Cathy's Art Diary

Interesting exhibition at the Design Museum by their current designers in residence. I wasn’t sure how all the work fitted the theme they had been asked to respond to of Islands but there were some interesting ideas. I liked Marianna Janowicz’s investigation into how we dry clothes now. As people no longer use laundries clothes are washed and dried at home often leading to condensation and damp issues. It was interesting to think about how we think we’ve improved things but may in fact have created other problems. My favourite idea was the creation of pigeon lofts to hang along railway lines in London by James Perlow Powell. The pigeon poo or guano would be collected for fertiliser. Closes 24 September 2023  

Interesting exhibition at the Design Museum of the result of the work of the designers in residence last year. Evidently earlier in the show you would have watched the designers at work in studio style spaces which then morphed into these exhibition spaces. They had been asked to address the challenges we face as we strive to improve the quality of life. Helga Schmid offered a space in which she represented a day in 12 minutes via light and temperature effects. It was an interesting idea but I felt one aspect of bad design was having the information board about the work behind the place where people were asked to take their shoes off. This hindered you reading the board and made me lose patience with the work. My favourite work was by Hester Buch where she had looked at green space in post-war housing estates and created an archive of community gardening projects and a trail of plants around the museum which were to be donated to projects in the archive after the show....

Fascinating exhibition at the Design Museum looking at work by this year’s four designers in residence who were given the theme of disruption to explore. James Christian addresses current housing problems by looking at social housing of previous eras which although it was demolished because of the issues with it did have some good ideas which could be reused. He took as his examples the Victorian Rookeries and the 17th century London Bridge and applied the ideas to the De Beauvoir Estate in East London. The result was   interesting development of roof areas using self-build principles. Ilona Gaynor looked at a hypothetical legal case regarding a lottery fraud to address how law can manipulated by how evidence is received. She used a series of scale models, photographs and graphical material to discuss the difference between drama and reality. Patrick Stevenson-Keating looked at the role of the economy and currency via technological interfaces. He looked at how tec...