Over the moon: Oscar Lhermitte (centre) and designers from Kudu with their lunar globes
Wanting the Moon may not be an unreasonable ambition afterall.
That is because a group of designers from Hackney has produced the world’s first exact replica of the Moon – only 20 million times smaller than the real thing.
Designer Oscar Lhermitte and Kudu studio have created lunar globes using data from Nasa, allowing them to replicate all of the Moon’s craters, bumps and ridges in 3D.
Lhermitte, a Hackney-based designer from France, has long held an interest in science and astronomy.
“To me it is a combination of the unknown, mixed with accuracy and correctness,” he says.
“The Moon is special to me as it is the first astral body that you can very easily observe, every night.”
The lunar globe project took four years to complete, and started when Lhermitte “stumbled” upon some of the latest NASA images from the Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter mission.
“They were high resolution pictures of the Moon,” he recalls. “ I wondered, is there enough data available to recreate it in 3D? Once I dived into the project, I became more and more obsessed at making the best lunar globe possible.”
Surface beauty: Moons accurately map all of the Moon’s craters
The complex design process saw Lhermitte print a moon in 3D. He then made a mould from the print out which could then be cast in polyurethane resin.
“Mould making is a craft by itself and there is so much to learn before being able to make a good cast. So I took a job with specialist mould makers to learn that craft,” Lhermitte says.
Shoreditch-based design studio Kudu then built a computer with the same memory as those used for the 1969 Moon landings, and used it to control a ring of revolving LED lights around the globe.
“At any given time, both the real Moon and the globe are lit the same way,” Lhermitte says.
Lhermitte and Kudu are on a mission to fund the production of the first batch of 50 moons, and have launched a kickstarter to achieve their goal.
George Blacklock, Detail from Pieta XI, 2006, oil on canvas, 153 x 122 cm (c) George Blacklock, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery, London and New York
Slipping Glimpsers is the admirably titled joint exhibition by Dean of Chelsea College of Art George Blacklock and the filmmaker and photographer Gary Oldman.
Said title is a nod to Expressionist painter Willem De Kooning and refers to a process of continually observing one’s own thoughts and sensations during the process of painting.
Intuitive observation and retrieval is the common thread linking the two artists, who became firm friends 30 years ago. They formed a band together and worked on the 1984 BBC film Honest, Decent and True.
In this two-man show, Oldman exhibits photography from film-sets whilst Blacklock displays paintings of densely populated pictorial spaces, filled with a sonorous quality.
George Blacklock, Pieta XI, 2006, oil on canvas, 153 x 122 cm (c) George Blacklock, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery, London and New York
Blacklock’s painting Pieta XI (2006) is a sensorial transcription of Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture.
The painting transmits an unreservedly tactile, physical, and personal account of the internal psychological effect of the sculpture.
There is interplay between layers of varying material viscosities; Prussian blue with a yellow veil over a red ground accompanied by white accents.
The yellow sweeps over blue creating green to blue tones. Colours are encouraged to bleed, overspill and resurface as pentimenti.
Intertwined forms, colour and line are put into tension and dance as these forms fuse and evolve.
It is a ‘linguistic’ inventiveness reminiscent of the playful and visually plastic pictographic writing system of the Mayans.
Slipping Glimpsers 14 April – 14 May 2016 Flowers Gallery 82 Kingsland Road, E2 8DPz flowersgallery.com
Generation sex – The Wardrobe Company on stage. Photograph: Jack Offord
Sex began in 1963, said Philip Larkin. But in a play at Shoreditch Town Hall it’s the seventies providing fertile ground for sexual awakening.
In 1972: The Future of Sex by The Wardrobe Ensemble three couples embark on having sex for the first time during one evening.
This is the year when Ziggy Stardust first appeared on Top of the Pops, when Lady Chatterley’s Lover was finally published unabridged, and when the notorious pornographic film Deepthroat was released.
“Our research led us to that moment because it seemed quite significant time in British public consciousness in terms of the changing of attitudes about gender and sexuality,” says the play’s director Tom Brennan.
“We were looking to make a show about sex and sexual anxiety and our discussions led us to that moment in time between the AIDS epidemic and the sexual revolution.”
In this era of glam rock and space-hoppers, Christine is steeling herself for the loss of her virginity with the nerdy lead singer of a local band, whilst other storylines involve a student who is inspired by her university professor in more ways than one, and Brian in his bedroom, exploring his sexual identity by himself.
“The storylines are kind of woven together – we’ve structured it so we have a lot of narration in the show which allows us to jump between the storylines and kind of explore them simultaneously in some cases,” Brennan explains.
The show features original music from Bristol-based songwriter Tom Crosley-Thorne, a school friend of Brennan.
“I was in a band with him and when I was first talking to him about doing this show, the next day he sent me these amazing tracks, which are perfect homages to Bowie and The Who and Chaka Khan.”
After a preview last year at Shoreditch Town Hall, Brennan and fellow members of The Wardrobe Ensemble took the play up to Edinburgh where it earned rave reviews.
Now back in Shoreditch for a longer run, the play will be aiming to humorously highlight the challenges and pitfalls of growing up as a member of the class of ’72.
“You had the first gay pride march in London and Lady Chatterley’s Lover was around,” Brennan says. “But then you had Mary Whitehouse and the National Festival of Light trying to ‘restore Christian morals’. So it was quite an interesting time.”
1972: The Future of Sex 12–23 April Shoreditch Town Hall, 380 Old Street, EC1V 9LT shoreditchtownhall.com
Strange and Familiar is an epic exhibition about Britain, in which photographers from around the world and from down the years offer a fresh eye to the look and feel our idiosyncratic island.
Martin Parr, the British documentary photographer and photojournalist, has curated a show spanning from the 1930s to the present day, giving an outsider’s view of people and places that might otherwise feel familiar.
London and its citizens feature heavily, as might be expected, but so do the cities of the north, the mining villages of Wales, and some of the most isolated and intriguing corners of the British Isles.
Britain being one of the centres of culture in the world throughout the 20th century, the list of photographers who have placed it under their lens unsurprisingly corresponds to some of the biggest names in the history of the medium.
Giants like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank are included here, but their work is placed alongside less well-known or more recently-lauded artists, informing and strengthening the impact of iconic images and often-imitated styles.
Edith Tudor Hart’s images, which appear alongside Cartier-Bresson’s, for example, offer a counterpart insight into 1930s Britain, seen through the eyes of an émigré Jewish woman. Her self-portrait with a random shopper in a market mirror was one of the first moments of stand-and-stare wonder in an exhibit of infinitely fascinating images.
As the exhibition moves forward through time, similar pairings evoke a sense of the feel of an era or moment. Robert Frank and Paul Strand’s 1950s explorations of London bankers, Welsh miners and the inhabitants of the Outer Hebrides acutely demonstrate the gulf in lives and society across the country at the time, and the difficulty of moving between them.
The importance of the changes in medium, and the technical advances that occur throughout the exhibition’s span are as equally present as the photographers. Noticing the shifting grain and quality of different artists’ preferred cameras and film stocks is a fascinating aspect of the experience of viewing so many images so closely together.
Key moments in photographers’ use of new technologies stand out, most vividly when Bruce Davidson’s mid-1960s photos of Welsh mining towns explode into hyper-real colour, the pink smoke staining the images of cobbled streets and grey stone houses. Frank Hablicht’s sexually charged images of the swinging 60s are playful and mobile, the camera peeking up and out to offer a flavour of the motion of the bright young things portrayed.
Raymond Depardon’s images of 1980s Glasgow contain some of the most striking uses of colour in the whole exhibition, the flames of burning rubbish glowing against a grimy background, or the harsh red of a car popping against slate grey housing. In the downstairs section of the gallery we are offered work that is further away from the conventions of portraiture, landscape and photojournalism, including the intricate scrapbooks of Shinro Ohtake, and Bruce Gilden’s contemporary extreme close-up grotesqueries.
The exhibition pans around the upstairs gallery and the ground floor corridor rooms, built around a central library space that gives visitors a wonderful opportunity to sit and leaf through the books that many of the photographs are drawn from. It’s an opportunity to handle the images, to inspect them in your hands rather than squint between shoulders at the wall. The break this offers may also be welcome, as the exhibition is enormous and warrants a leisurely visit to see it all.
Parr has created a huge and expansive survey of Britain, and done so in a way that might provide real insight into the funny place that many of us call home. Like the best survey exhibitions, different parts will appeal to different viewers, and you and I will each come away with our favourites and less-favourites. But more importantly this show is an excuse to wallow in beautiful documentary photography, in still images of everyday life and mundane strangeness, in the swim of history and the artistry of its documentation.
Strange and Familiar: Britain as Revealed by International Photographers Until 19 June Barbican Art Gallery Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS Facebook event
Part of ‘Deadly Nightshade’, one of Houchen’s pieces set to be exhibited in Pandora’s Box
The work of figurative painter Amanda Houchen is both of this world and otherworldly.
Her ephemeral characters, often inspired by actresses of the 1920s and 1950s, reside in colourful dream-like settings. They gaze out and look through the viewer, as though to question our own reality.
Context is what most of us look for in a figurative painting – the meaning behind the Mona Lisa’s smile. But a recognisable context is what Houchen seeks to deny the viewer.
“I’m interested in exploring the physicality of paint,” says Houchen.
“In this body of work, through the female form, I seek to capture the nature of artifice and the uncanny.”
This month at Unit G gallery off Well Street, Houchen will be exhibiting work from her Pandora’s Box series.
The focus is on the temporary nature of performance and stardom.
A pair of flappers bedecked in pearl necklaces and fur collars gaze out mournfully, their sense of self entirely dependent on the validation they seek from the audience. But a performance can only last so long.
Houchen’s source material includes the more obscure and choreographed settings of burlesque, cabaret or the circus – where people adopt theatrical roles and there’s an element of masquerade.
These are images that have the potential to be mythical, as Houchen combines imagery or tropes from specific eras to create new, unrecognisable images that subvert the viewer’s expectations.
Pandora’s Box 8 – 30 April Unit G, 12A Collent Street, E9 6SG unitg.london
Letting the side down: Polish film director Jerzy Skolimowski, whose films feature at this month’s Kinoteka Polish Film Festival
The Kinoteka Film Festival gets underway this month, with East London venues set to screen work by some of Poland’s most renowned filmmakers.
A retrospective of the films of Jerzy Skolimowski will be held at the Barbican.
Skolimowski is a maverick filmmaker who has worked as a director, writer and actor for over 50 years, and is regarded as one of Polish cinema’s most iconic figures.
For the opening gala on 7 April, Skolimowski will be there in person to introduce his new film 11 Minutes, which focuses on 11 minutes in the lives of a variety of characters whose paths cross as they race towards an unexpected finale.
The film, described as an “inventive metaphor for our modern hectic lives driven by blind chance”, will be followed by an onstage question and answer session with the director.
Over the month the Barbican will be showing more films from Skolimowski’s extensive back catalogue, including rarely screened titles such as 1960s psychological drama Barrier (with an introduction by Skolimowski), Deep End, a comedy-drama about obsession, and the 1982 film Moonlighting starring Jeremy Irons, which was awarded Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival.
The Shoreditch-based Close-Up Cinema will be hosting festival films too, as part of their Masters of Polish Cinema season. These include a screening of Skolimowski’s loose trilogy featuring his on-screen alter ego Andrzej Leszczyc: the films Identification Marks: None, Walkover and Hands Up!
The boutique cinema is also planning to show three early psychological thrillers by Roman Polanski: his Skolimowski-scripted debut Knife in the Water; the controversial, mind-bending exploration of psychosis, Repulsion; and the paranoiac ménage-à-trois Cul-de-sac.
Then later in the month the cinema will show Pawel Pawlikowski’s debut feature, Ida, the Oscar-winning film that delves through 20th century Polish history, scripted by East London resident Rebecca Lenkiewicz.
Bicycle courier turned journalist and author, Julian Sayarer
As a bicycle courier, Julian Sayarer spent three years being a “tangible cog” in a world of multi-million pound contracts, greasing the wheels of the global economy.
When Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, he delivered the receivership notices to the bank in Canary Wharf, becoming a bit-part player in a major historical event.
“It shows the quite humanised absurdity of the world economy that the couriers get paid £7.50 to deliver three sets of notices on a £50 billion bail out,” he recalls wryly.
In his book Messengers, Sayarer, now a journalist and author living in Dalston, writes about being a cycle courier, transporting information from bank to law firm, learning London off by heart, and becoming intimately acquainted with kerbs, potholes and alleyways.
Sayarer first started couriering after finishing university and returning from a year living in Istanbul.
“You’re pedalling around London, sometimes coughing your guts up because of the air quality, or you’re sick but don’t get sick pay and so have to go to work anyway. But I was in my early 20s and on balance it was enjoyable, diving between gaps in traffic and hammering it hard across the city for your next delivery.”
In 2009, Sayarer broke a world record for cycling around the world, recounted in his first book Life Cycles. The previous record holder, Mark Beaumont, had the backing of corporate firms and sponsorship deals. So when Sayarer broke the record he not only stuck it to his arch-rival, but to the man too.
But returning to London, the victory began to seem hollow. A world-record on your CV doesn’t always help your job prospects, and soon Sayarer slipped back into cycle couriering.
Messengers is set around 2010-11, after Sayarer had returned from travelling, and the initial thrill of darting around London on two wheels had made way to misgivings about the future.
“There’s lots of notions of readjustment in it,” he says. “Cycling through Kazakhstan, you’d get people inviting you in to have tea in their yurt, and then you go back to the City, which is money motivated, fast-paced and frequently hostile – so there’s quite a lot of reflection on the nature of the modern city.”
The word “precarious” comes up more than once in our conversation, a word that describes the profession in several ways.
Before the dawn of email, a bicycle courier could eke out a living, but now couriers are among the ranks of the lowest earners. In return for risking their lives each day they are made to work as self-employed contractors – meaning no pension contributions, no sick leave and no holiday pay.
But despite the physical exhaustion, the poor pay and the lack of prospects, there is also camaraderie amongst cycle couriers, a subculture and sense of community that marks it out from other professions.
“It’s an urban community and it has its rituals. You have the alleycat racers who organise races where messengers will compete against each other, you’ve got the courier world championships held in places like Chicago, Warsaw and Lausanne where couriers from around the world would race.
In London, couriers would hang out at the former Foundry pub, which lay on the corner the junction of Old Street and Great Eastern Street.
“There’d always be a gathering of couriers out front drinking tinnies from the off-licence, which is probably one of the reasons why the pub couldn’t survive,” Sayarer reflects.
As more vital information is driven online, cycle couriers will only become less needed and it might not be long before the profession disappears completely.
Sayarer tells me that when he was a courier, colleagues and friends would be able to get by through living in a squat – something no longer viable since squatting a residential building has been criminalised.
“It’s a genuine community that’ll look after people who maybe are a little rough around the edges but still have that right and need of a community, and I think the modern city is squeezing people out of space for that sort of thing,” he says.
A time came for Sayarer when the thrill of careering through traffic gave way to a fear of doing it for the rest of his life. Now 30, he can look back at couriering as a chapter of his life that has come to a close.
However, he is aware that not everyone doing the job has that luxury.
“It’s all well and good having this social tourism and saying this is a job with a shelf life and eventually you get out because it’s hard,” he says.
“But you need to talk about the people who don’t get out of that job, who are going to do it for the rest of their working lives and never manage to get the breaks to move on.
“I think it’s something I would have always wanted this book to bring out.”
Messengers: City Tales from a London Bicycle Courier is published by Arcadia Books. RRP: £8.99 ISBN: 9781910050767
Julian Sayerer will be reading from Messengers on 7th April at Pages of Hackney pagesofhackney.co.uk
Dean Rodney, the charismatic singer of The Fish Police. Photograph: The Fish Police
‘It’s gonna be a big one,” warns Dean Rodney, lead singer of the Fish Police – and although size is always relative, he isn’t wrong.
Within minutes of taking my seat at Café Oto, the five-piece launches into a song that has the venue on its feet. ‘Coco Butter’ nods to the quirky alternative hip-hop of De La Soul with its blaring 80s funk keyboards, but as a paean to the pale-yellow, edible vegetable fat extracted from the cocoa bean, this is music that inhabits its own unique world.
“Just a little cream, raise your hands up to the skies, it will moisturise,” Rodney implores. Won over, the crowd obeys. Before I know it the chairs are folded away – I’m in danger of becoming an island in a sea of revellers.
There’s no raised stage so audience and band blur into one as the dirty fuzz bass and spoken-word intro to ‘Black Scissors’ kicks in, calling to mind the silliest (and most fun) excesses of George Clinton.
The Fish Police play catchy and uplifting pop songs informed by singer Dean Rodney and guitarist Matt Howe’s autism. The band is part of a nascent music scene, where learning-disabled acts share bills and audiences with those unaffected, that includes Ravioli Me Away, a post-pop-punk trio with a penchant for costume who are the evening’s excellent support act.
Listening to the Fish Police takes you away from the drudgery of the real world into a joyful realm inhabited by cartoons.
Through the course of the night we hear about a Japanese girl who is “always reading and falling asleep in the classroom” and Monica 300, whose defining feature is her blue hair.
Watching the band is pure escapism from everyday drudgery, with Rodney’s deadpan delivery balanced by soulful backing vocals and some very capable musicianship from bassist Charles Stuart and drummer Andrew McClean (both of whom have played in Grace Jones’s backing band, no less).
The biggest crowd pleaser of the night is ‘Chicken Nuggets for Me’, in which Rodney whips the crowd into a frenzy promising “I’m gonna tell you how I like my chicken” before doing just that in the chorus (no spoilers).
Jumping up and down about chicken nuggets is an oddly liberating experience, and one that – like the rest of this band’s extraordinary output – comes highly recommended.
The Pro Wrestling EVE roster. Photograph: Pro Wrestling Eve / The Ringside Perspective
When the opening bell rang at London’s first ever all women’s wrestling event last month, it called time on another fight that has rumbled on for more than 60 years.
Professional wrestling in London was outlawed in the 1930s, and when the ban was lifted in 1952, the Home Office quickly passed a by-law exempting women.
The ban was finally dismissed for both sexes in 1987, but with the rise of American wrestling and their focus on ‘divas’, women’s wrestling became, for the most part, a sideshow.
But the ‘Let’s Make History’ event, hosted by professional women’s wrestling organisation Pro Wrestling EVE at the Cre8 Lifestyle Centre in Hackney Wick aimed to ‘redefine’ this much maligned genre.
The evening featured many different styles, from the taut, technical wrestling of April Davids and local fighter Pollyanna, to the all-out physical contests often referred to in wrestling vernacular as ‘slobberknockers’.
In fact, the sheer close-up danger of the slams, leaps and head-first drops on show triggered audible shock amongst some curious, less experienced punters, who seemed surprised at just how real this ‘fake sport’ could be.
Lighter moments came with the arrival of identical twin tag-team The Owens Twins, and the suspiciously English-accented Tennessee Honey, billed as hailing from “Peckham, Tennessee.”
At one point, two wrestlers launched each other into the venue’s soundproofing tiles, leaving a visible dent and triggering speculation that EVE’s damage deposit was in jeopardy.
Luckily, the venue staff seemed to be getting into the spirit of things.
Cre8 employee Melissa Herbert, who spoke of remembering “the originals – Big Daddy, Giant Haystacks…” told the East End Review: “I hope they are successful. They’re bringing something different to Hackney.
“There are girls out there who want to do something physical, but something different.”
As if to hammer this point home, a representative from South London wrestling school Burning Hearts circulated the crowd, asking punters whether they could see themselves lining up alongside the stars of EVE in future.
A chant of ‘this is wrestling’ echoed around the auditorium and, as a bruised but triumphant Rhia O’Reilly emerged to lift the EVE Championship belt, the message couldn’t ‘ring’ any clearer.
It would be fair to wonder what is to be gained from staging a radio play without any visuals at all. The audience watching Samuel Beckett’s one act 1956 piece, All That Fall at the legendary Wilton’s Music Hall sit blindfolded for the duration of the performance. But without pesky sight to distract from the pithy dialogue, Out of Joint’s production successfully strips the play down to its bare, nihilistic bones with brilliant effect.
The cast wind through the space, allowing for voices to rise unexpectedly out of the darkness, while pre-recorded broken excerpts of Schubert and the screeches of incoming trains make the gloomy soundscape even more ominous.
Set in rural Ireland, the play follows the journey of the elderly Mrs Rooney to meet her blind husband as he arrives on the 12.30 train. Consistently maudlin and self-centred, Mrs Rooney’s outlook towards the world is so morbid that you’re left feeling desperate to escape her company – if only her cynicism wasn’t quite so funny. Laughter echoed around the room as she sighed and complained through the first half of the performance. However self-indulgent Mrs Rooney’s rambling though, her pain is nonetheless real. “Love, that is all I asked… daily love like a Paris horse-butcher’s regular,” she croakily laments.
The simplicity of the plot does not mean that All That Fall is an easy play to grasp. The individual backgrounds of the characters are never fully known, the context of their conversations is never understood, and questions are left unanswered. Beckett’s usual themes of death and decay are everywhere, and the naturalistic script does not make it any less surreal than some of his other works.
Despite the occasionally shaky Irish accent, the greatest strength of the production lies in the cast’s ability to deliver the script with warmth and conviction, allowing for the play’s heavier aspects to seep through without sounding forced. In the 60 minutes during which nothing very much happens, we’re left with a lot to ponder. It seems that sometimes being kept in the dark can be a good thing after all.
All That Fall
Until 9 April
Wilton’s Music Hall
1 Graces Alley, E1 8JB wiltons.org.uk
