Cathy's Art Diary

Strangely compelling exhibition at the Design Museum on design in football. I’m not a football fan but as the commentary says the game does shape how many people organise their time, dress and relate to communities. The opening section became a history of the game via developments in design of basic events like balls and boots. There were some significant objects to demonstrate this eg two balls from the first FIFA world cup final where each team provided a ball for half the game to ensure fairness before balls were standardised. It also looked at developments in player health and different game formations. This was followed by a section on Identity looking at how kits developed and the fan culture which included a colourful display of kits and a fan made Hillsbough banner.   Next came stadiums and crowd behaviour looking at things like how chants make a crowd breath and move together. Sadly it also had to look at disasters. It moved on to spectacles including the developm...

Interesting small exhibition at the British Library looking at the history of women’s football in Great Britain. The show was timed to coincide with the Women’s World Cup and consisted of good commentary boards and display cases of books and ephemera. I hadn’t realised how most major towns had a team up to 1921 when the Football Association banned women from playing. A ban that was only lifted in 1970. I loved the section on these early days including a photo of Nettie Honeyballs (a pseudonym) and details of a North v South matched played in London to a crowd of 12000. It then explained how, post the 1966 England men’s win in the World Cup, and with the rise of feminism, people began to question the ban. There was a nice collection of ephemera from this time including minutes of the first AGM of the Women’s Football Association. The last section brought things up to date by looking at the Women’s World Cup which began in 1991 and of course included a copy of the dvd of...

Surprisingly interesting exhibition at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum looking at story of football in Scotland. Surprisingly because I’m not Scottish and not that keen on football! The real star of the show was the Scottish Football Museum which had lent lots of items and seems to have made a concerted effort to save pieces of memorabilia from grounds which were being updated particularly after the changes to grounds following Hillsborough. There were some lovely items such as a child jersey from about 1890, a grammar book from1691 which mentioned pupils playing Pila Pedalus or football. There were lots of things for children to do without making the whole thing patronising including an electronic game about the offside rule and a virtual football pitch on the floor on which you could like a virtual ball. I didn’t see a child use it but I did see one of the security guards slip in for a kick around!  

Small advertising exhibition at the O2 on the work Adidas in designing the kit for Team GB for the Beijing Olympics and looking forward to London 2012. They have picked 30 Olympians from the main and Paralympics to focus on and photographed them in a setting which means a lot to them. Each athletic has a stand dedicated to them with a picture , a video about them and a piece of their specialised equipment. A nice touch is that as the events have gone on and the win medal pictures of those medals have been stuck on their stand. It was a nice bonus to find this exhibition on a trip to the cinema!