The Great Northern Contemporary Craft Fair 2012 Review Pt 1 Holly Levell, Jin Eui Kim, Ella Robinson
Yesterday I spent a few hours, enjoying an artistic catch up with some of the new exhibitors at this years Great Northern Contemporary Craft Fair.
Holly Levell has created some fun soft textile sculptures with her ‘felt fabric’ take on your modern day shopping items.
Holly makes each piece by hand and even does all the embroidery on it freehand on her sewing machine. If she sells one piece, then she simply starts again and remakes it from scratch ! Amazing patience and hand to eye co-ordination. Made me smile.
Directed and precision is the name of the game for Cardiff based ceramist Jin Eui Kim.
He says ” My work explores how the perception of three-dimensional ceramic forms can be manipulated by the application of arrangements of bands on their surfaces. Depending on the arrangement, using gradients of width, interval or tone, illusory spatial phenomena can appear and thus significantly influence the actual three-dimensional forms.” Some of his ceramics are flat and some have ridges where the grey banding is. Some wonderful tricks of the eye start to play around when you’re looking at them.
Ella Robinson is a Brighton based collector of all that glitters and has been thrown away, or discarded on the street.
She has a great attitude towards recycling discarded items back into art and creates some wonderfully colourful framed collections in the process. What people don’t realise is the time that goes into saving up all of the objects, walking around on a beach in the freezing temperatures or wind and rain looking for bits of driftwood or shards of broken ceramic that will make up her next piece. I’m glad she’s brave enough to face the elements to create these stunning pieces.
Much much more designers’ work to come over the next week but in the meantime, get down to the Craft Fair which is on in Manchester, Spinningfields for today and tomorrow, times and directions here.
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Oooooooo everything looks even better than I remember. In my excitement I showed this page to my young son……these are his comments: “wow ……. are the monster munch bags, bean bags cos I would love one of them?!! ”
………and of Ella’s Found collections ” they are REALLY good, but when she’s collecting that stuff off the street isn’t she worried that everyone would think she was a tramp! ”
………to which I replied that The Lovely Ella did mention that’s how she sometimes felt. BUT I think it’s definitely worth it ……..Because she has made those every day non aesthetic objects look stunningly beautiful.
Thanks Sarah, good to get some feedback from a different generation. Much appreciated and I’m sure Holly will like the idea of foodie beanbags too !