Exposure » Design

My London: Rob Ryan and Stephen Walter

selina — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:17:39 +0000

Exhibition of work by Rob Ryan and Stephen Walter showing their unique perspectives of our capital city.

Ryan is a romantic; his highly decorative and elaborate paper cuts and screen prints show loving couples with hands clasped, surrounded by church bells, boats, boughs, and other motifs. On close inspection, you discover words delicately cut amongst the imagery and see a world filled with dark as well as light where love, hate, loss, pain, fear and death are interwoven. This body of work, beneath its overtly visual romanticism, is visceral in its melancholy. Ryan’s poetry-filled art evokes fairy-tales; the simple and straightforward subjects are in marked contrast to the deceptively sophisticated manner in which the works are made, painstakingly hand-cut with the smallest scalpels from the finest papers.

Walter was inspired by the unfolding drama of city life. ‘The Island: London Series’ is a collection of intricate drawings mapping the 33 individual boroughs as well as amalgamating them into one large island. ‘The Island’ took two years to complete and requires the use of a magnifying glass to decipher its central areas. The geographically accurate maps include many of London’s main roads, railway lines, landmarks and green spaces. However, on closer inspection, ‘they have their own unique identities fashioned by the artist’s idiosyncratic semiotics, wittily juxtaposed with the familiar everyday signage of maps and public spaces. Indeed, Stephen Walter’s lucid combination of diverse source material and his accurate re-mapping of the city that is so compelling, inviting viewers to re-visit the piece and discover something quite new each time, maybe even their own house or road!

Thursday 4th February – Tuesday 2nd March 2010
Gallery Opening Times – Monday to Friday, 10.00 – 18.00

All further information:

Chloé Nelkin
T: 07764 273 219, 020 7907 7200, E: chloe.nelkin@exposure.net

Hannah Leiser
T: 020 7907 7130, E: hannah.leiser@exposure.net

Lego Kitchen

selina — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 10:29:46 +0000

The ultimate ‘build it yourself’ worktop
To build your own:
Take one basic IKEA kitchen island
Over 20,000 pieces of Lego
One whole week of you life, or more if you normally struggle to decipher the IKEA flat-pack instructions to build the kitchen island.

Parisian designers Simon Pillard and Philippe Rosetti, created this functional yet fun one-of-a-kind centrepiece for their own kitchen, by covering an IKEA kitchen workstation entirely with Lego. Lego is an inspiration that never seems to age. The iconic building blocks are still enabling people to create anything they like after all these years. But this example definitely shows our age. Well, when have you ever seen a six year old design a kitchen out of Lego? What happened to building the best space rocket ever?

Craftwork / Woolworks

selina — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:59:51 +0000

An exhibition of contemporary textile works designed and hand made by Craftwork at Exposure Gallery.
Wool Works is comprised of two large-scale hanging textile works crafted from natural wool and aluminum. Through making these works, Craftwork has focused on building bridges between the disciplines of art, craft, design and fashion.
Using aluminum and natural wool top slivers, each screen is a collection of long hanks of wool, hand-made and twisted into rope. These rope strands are bound together by combining knotting and are also held in place with powder coated / mirrored aluminum tubes. Craftwork signature Pompoms punctuate and locate the macramé knots woven throughout. In these beautiful works, there is a strong visual interplay between graphics, materials and textures whilst fusing large-scale textile design with jewelry.

Craftwork was founded in 2007 by fashion designer, Caroline Smithson, and architectural designer, Mehrnoosh Khadivi. The pair met in 2004 but it wasn’t until late 2007 that the weekly you-teach-me-crochet-I’ll-teach-you-knitting craft evenings were born.
Here, they could practice a type of work where useful and decorative items are made by hand using only simple tools. Whilst exploring the possibilities of re-applying these traditional craft techniques, it became apparent that this home handicrafts and back-to-basics ethos could be applied to items that may be functional or strictly decorative, including architecture, interiors and reclamation. The use of hands and lack of machines impart an individuality to each item they make which is lacking in manufactured goods.
Thus, Craftwork began in earnest, pompom-ing and patchworking its way through London. The duo draw on their professional training, interests in practicing established techniques and their upbringings in Berwick Upon Tweed, a town known for its witches and Iran’s mystical Persian culture for their inspiration.
To date they have produced handmade macramé shoes, a leather upholstered macramé stools, wall hangings, pompom swings & soft toys.