MOMIJI: Spread the Love

14.10.08


"You have arrived in the land of Momiji, a sacred place of love, peace, music, chickens, harmony, and stuff."

Momiji dolls are a seemingly infinite range of collectable 'friendship dolls' from Japan. The wide variety of 'cute', brightly-coloured dolls each have a tiny slip of paper hidden within them on which one can write a secret, or a message to an intended recipient of the doll. The brand is kitsch and naive with a central mantra of "Spread the Love"; the ethos of the dolls and the huge range of spin-off products is to promote joy and happiness in simple things.

Keeping it in The Family with Le Gun Magazine

With a few fellow students, I spent two weeks helping prepare Le Gun's 'The Family' exhibition, at the Rochelle Gallery, Shoreditch.

Le Gun are an illustration/design collective, who periodically produce a satisfyingly chunky magazine/book collating their own warped illustrations and those of countless contributors. I heard about them in my first year when I went to a lecture by two core members, Neal Fox and Chris Bianchi, whose dedication and refreshingly laid-back, gin-soaked approach completely won us over.

Our relationship with Le Gun was maintained through workshops with Bianchi, illustrator/grand-master bookbinder Billy Bragg, designers Matt Appleton and Alex Wright, and the inimitable Robert Greene. When Billy called for assistance in building a 100%-cardboard living room/arts club for their latest show, we couldn't pass it up.

We went to their Hackney studio to build fully-functional armchairs, sofas and tables using heavy-duty card, tape and many dodgy glue guns, before moving into the gallery to construct what was to become one of the exhibition's highlights.





The exhibition/launch party kicked off on Wednesday August 27th, attracting a huge number of people who drank the bar dry, packed out the gallery space and lounged happily around the cardboard living room. A raucous parade, complete with marching band, guided the masses to a heaving after-party at Cargo, Shoreditch.

It's been a bizarre, insane, disturbing, exhausting pleasure to be part of it all. Special thanks to Billy for letting us get involved to such an extent.

Le Gun links:
LE GUN Official Website
LE GUN Blog
Le Gun on Myspace

"The Family" links
Michele Panzeri's photographs of the exhibition
Eye magazine: Le Gun feature
Review of 'The Family' for The Londonist by Oliver Gili

Bookbinding & triple fold

Hardback binding
Aside from one tutorial with Bill Bragg I hadn't ever done bookbinding before. But with an intricate arrangement of clamps and heavy books I bound them reasonably well. I made a fairly messy job of the hardback covers but was happy overall with the way they worked out. I know where I went wrong so when I next do it, I'll improve.




Triple-fold

To chart the journey each book imparts, I wanted to find a way of including the locations linked to the contents of each page without interrupting the individual page layouts and designs. By triple-folding the edges of a French-fold book I could bury the information in the V-shape this forms, so that it is accessible but not intrusive.

Final Outcome: MARKED TERRITORY

The final three books have turned out well. Through a combination of specially-chosen photos, written passages, illustrations and typography, they demonstrate the psychogeographical differences between regions of London, evident in the marks made on the environment by those who inhabit it.

Three Hours From: HACKNEY

The third journey took me around areas of east London, some familiar and some unfamiliar to me. I live in Bethnal Green but don't usually venture much further north from my home in Roman Road. This trip took me up from Mare Street in Hackney up to Dalston, then sent me straight back down to finish in Brick Lane, which is familiar territory to me.

So far this project has seen each outing reveal a theme or underlying trend to the specific journey. This trip around east London didn't immediately throw up any common points but I did notice eventually that a large number of details I was registering were concerned with obvious physical marks that people had made on the streets, ranging from the deliberate (stickers, posters, graffiti, political slogans) to the marks made by people simply living in the particular locations. With such a high immigrant population the area bears the characteristics and marks of the people who live there. Therefore the shops, language, signage and people themselves help paint a picture of the community and those that make it.

Where Next?

I'm a bit stuck now.

Initially I wanted to create a series of books, each relating to a different journey and dealing with the content in a different way - illustrative, typographic, photographic etc. Now I have many photographs, many notes, many points to make, but I'm unsure now where to take it all. I have way, way too much information.

I want to pick three journeys to compare and contrast the different areas in terms of the people there, and the way people and place relate. South Ken being upmarket with its royal history reflects this in the cleanliness and architectural detailing, for example, whereas Hackney is scruffy, weathered and rough-round-the-edges, with a high immigrant population and some very underprivileged neighbourhoods. The people I saw and heard in each place varied hugely and I got some great images of a few of them.

Outcome: MARKED TERRITORY series
Three books, each focusing on one journey, documenting the marks people make on their environment and what this tells us about their relationship with their surroundings, both current and historical. The books will tell the story of the areas' people using type, illustration and photography.

Three Hours From: CAMBERWELL

On this second journey I ended up walking from Denmark Hill in Camberwell to Clapham Common, via Brixton and Stockwell. Initially it was difficult to find a focus as I started out in a fairly mixed and quiet residential zone.

However, by the time I'd reached Brixton I had noticed a proliferation of churches and religious centres en route that suggested an ongoing theme of faith and religious devotion. This trailed off once I got into Brixton but here with the noise and visual blare of Brixton on market day I developed an interest in the strong community I witnessed, largely Afro-Caribbean, and how an area of town known for being dodgy and shabby is also home to genuinely cheerful and community-spirited people. When I reached Clapham I saw an altogether different community. The weather was glorious so people were littered across Clapham Common sunbathing and chatting. They were a community in that they were all out together. But they remain within their social pockets. As I understand it, Clapham was shabby and run-down until about the 1980's when the property-market exploded, and the 'Sloane Rangers' (sons and daughters of both the aristocracy and the upper-middle classes, who, either single or married, wanted to work in London), who traditionally bought or rented in Chelsea and South Ken, could not afford to. It became necessary for them to find new areas to colonise, and Battersea/Clapham/Balham were just across the water, and still close to the West End and the City. Thus, the gentrification of these areas.

While it's got a lovely atmosphere, I felt like the little groups or pairs of people in cafes, on the common, etc. were isolated from one another. I saw lots of people shooting disapproving looks at playing children, tutting at dogs, sitting quietly on their own reading books. There wasn't any real sense of community, nothing like that I experienced at Brixton.

Three Hours From: SOUTH KENSINGTON

Despite changeable weather I really enjoyed this first full-length journey. I literally wandered in whatever direction I felt like, not looking at a map once. This strategy took me on a journey through the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, one of the most affluent and beautiful boroughs of London.

I hoped that on each journey I undertook for this project, a defining theme or feature specific to each individual walk would emerge. In this case, I found myself continually noting architectural detail, the intricacies of ironwork, carvings and sculptures. With such a proliferation of historically rich and important buildings in this royal borough, I think the focus of follow-up work for this first outing will be the attention to detail and the resolute high presentation standards of this area of London. As the royal borough, it is imperative that Kensington is kept as pristine as possible; the rare piece of litter on the streets looks guilty and lonely, graffiti is minimal (removed immediately) and the streets are patrolled by wardens particularly concerned with keeping it clean and orderly.

The defining artworks of Kensington are in most cases hundreds of years old. Their grandeur and detail have been designed to showcase the wealth, prosperity and regality of the city, and to continue to bear evidence of this through the centuries. They are built to last, considered, and very well-guarded. This is an interesting contrast to the edgier, less privileged areas of London, where the surfaces of the streets are continually being modified and adapted. Artwork is more transient, rules of preservation less stringent. The pride and grandeur evident walking through this affluent pocket of West London will be the subject of my work for this first journey.

Wrong-footed - Progress update

Despite a very disheartening trial run, during which I lost the will to live somewhere in the middle of a puddle in Hackney, I am going to continue with this concept. I will also continue to research the Situationists because the writings I have been reading are genuinely interesting and I think they will inform my observations and the conclusions I'll draw from what I will see.

Quote: Raoul Veneigem

All we have in common is the illusion of being together. And beyond the illusion of permitted anodynes there is only the collective desire to destroy isolation... By producing isolation, contemporary social organization signs its own death-sentence.
The Revolution of Everyday Life:
Impossible Participation or Power as the Sum of Constraints

Where to start

I spread the map out on the floor, held nine coloured pins in one hand, shut my eyes, and randomly distributed the pins across the map. That's it, that's final. I'll start from those locations.

1) Harts Lane, New Cross Gate
2) Warner Road, Camberwell
3) Thames Street, Blackfriars
4) Mare Street, Hackney
5) Hyde Park
6) Wandsworth Bridge Road, Walham Green
7) Grove End Road, St Johns Wood
8) Cromwell Road, South Kensington
9) Westferry Road, Limehouse

This could be quite an interesting project. I have a wide variety of starting points. Today I will make my first journey, taking with me a camera, sketchbook/notepad and a sadly much-needed umbrella. It'll be interesting to see if this actually works.

Three Hours

I don't want to regiment this project to the extent of its predecessor. This investigation into observation and documentation should focus on those things without being bogged down by the details of how I reach the places I end up in. However I should develop some rules to ensure a common structure to the journeys I make.

I was listening to Nick Drake's Three Hours, a song about escape and the eternal seeker. I thought how far one could travel in three hours, then decided this could be the guiding principle to this project.

Electing at random a number of different starting points, I will travel away from each one for three hours. I'll employ similar but less stringent practices to decide how to move away from those places, to maintain the element of 'the unknown', but essentially the concern in each case will be observation.

Three hours is needed
To leave from them all
Three hours to wonder
And three hours to fall.

Next step: select the random starting points
Following this: get moving.

Oh, to wander free...

Faced with the opportunity of effectively doing whatever I wanted for the final few weeks of term, I toyed with a variety of ideas that probably wouldn't have been sustainable/possible for that length of time - illustration & art direction for the band Hush the Many (Heed the Few), a photographic series based on the depressingly repetitive interiors of chain fast food restaurants, even the construction of a ghost ride.

A recurrent theme in my work is making observations of the world around me and my recordings of those observations. In the first term I designed a game of chance based around travel in London, allowing chance to dictate my route and developing a complicated system by which to document my movements.

During these prescribed journeys I saw and heard and experienced a huge amount that was not possible or appropriate to document within the confines of the brief. This always frustrated me.

Therefore I propose to revisit the concept from which I allowed myself to deviate, the concept that interested me the most - the idea of setting out on a journey at the mercy of the unknown and learning from the environments in which I end up. The proposed outcome will be a boxed collection of short documents, taking various forms including illustrative, photographic, typographic and perhaps even filmic. The structure will be inspired by the Sagmeister 'Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far' publication.

Researching:
- Hamish Fulton
- Richard Long
- John Cage
- Fluxus
- Situationism (in more depth than before)

Think on.

Film: TRANSIENT PROJECTIONS

So this is the finished film, Transient Projections, by me and Gemma Rhead. In the end, it all went a bit 'differently' to The Plan, but I think we created an interesting piece of work.
Music: 'Violet Tree' by M83

Building blocks

For one week only we had full run of the biggest workspace at Chelsea, so we wanted to make the most of it. Our strongest idea for the motion graphics project involved building a miniature city so we started with that in mind and decided to see where it took us.

We collected a large number of cardboard boxes which we subsequently assembled into some form of representative city.


The next stage was to play with projecting imagery onto the boxes to see what effects we could achieve. One successful test involved hooking up a camcorder to feed back live the image of the 'city' against the plain background, to give the impression of it being endless.



We decided to see if it was possible to project a different film onto each of the different surfaces - to resize video clips and have many playing simultaneously, through the same projector, from the same master file. This way, we could create a moving miniature city.

We collected over 35 individual minute-long clips of London scenes, featuring both moving or static subjects. Having connected the projector to a laptop, we used Final Cut to create a composite video file with most of the clips arranged in sizes and positions that allowed each one to marry up with particular boxes. This was painstaking but by the end we had 25 clips projecting onto 25 boxes.

Paper pictures, bits of string

We're planning a collaborative project that will rely mainly on hand-generated production. Our collective view was that we favoured the idea of building and constructing, on any scale, for this brief, and this theme should underpin the designs we came up with at the outset.

PAPER CITY
The original concept was to construct a purely paper city, a scale model of either a known or an invented metropolis; we would film its construction and then destroy it somehow, to the soundtrack of members of the public talking about their concern for the future of the city. The model is exemplified by this installation produced for the cover of an album by 'The Non', the progress of which is tracked here.





TRICK
We then thought of creating everyday objects out of plain white paper, life-size, then placing them in the urban arena and filming them. They would look out of place due to their colour, yet appropriately scaled and suited to their location. This was inspired by the work of Peter Callesen, a strange genius with too much free time who can make anything out of paper. Regard.




CUT OUT
The third and so far strongest idea lends itself most successfully to the moving image brief. After seeing the album artwork for 'Destination Anywhere' by Wheel, we had the idea of creating sets and characters in the 3D cut-and-paste style adopted by Viveletuning.





We could animate cut-out characters literally moving through the layers of the city. We could record sounds from around London appropriate to the sets in the animation, play with lighting for different moods and basic effects like panning shots, stop-motion etc. We could use AfterEffects to extend the boundaries of the city and assist with the animation techniques, but the emphasis would be on physically moving the components ourselves.

Doom Puppet

The dangers of letting A Big Idea take hold of you became apparent this weekend.

I set my little heart on designing and staging a puppet show based on urban living with custom-built marionettes telling the tales of the city. I researched puppets. I researched ventriloquism. I accidentally applied for a job at the Jim Henson Creature Shop in America. I made outrageously high bids on eBay to obtain a puppet (£15.72) and a vetriloquist's dummy (£34.22).

Thanks to the combined efforts of '3dwerkstatt', 'phillipmorton' and 'leeroyking' I have lost out on not only a 1960s Magic Toy Shop Socco puppet but also a fabulously hideous Mr Parlanchin dummy (with detachable moustache) which sold for a piss-taking £45.00.

So it's back to the (still somewhat blank) drawing board...

First/Last Magazine

The brief: To illustrate across a double-page spread the first and last lines of a randomly-selected book. The images could be drawn, constructed, photographed, written...anything goes, as long as it was black and white and represented the text somehow.

My 'first and last' were taken from Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan, a book I have never read. We weren't encouraged to research the books we chose if we knew nothing about them, the idea being that we created an original untainted response.

(Click on the image below to enlarge)



Visit the First Last Magazine blog for updates and more information.