Went to my first stock car race at Buxton Raceway. It reminded me of Mad Max, The Warriors and maybe Brassed Off all rolled into one. It was exciting and fascinating to peek into a subculture with it’s own niche references, in-jokes and tight range of styes.
Morris Dancing in Stockport
I went to the Joint Morris Organisation Day of Dance in Stockport the other weekend. Such a joyful, colourful, visually rich event. I couldn’t stop smiling at folk just having fun. A beautiful combination of tradition, community, pride, performance and silliness.
10/10 would look out for more morris dancing again.
New Aesthetics? —
They've been about for a while but it's only fairly recently that drones or quadrocopters with cameras have become good enough or cheap enough to use by say wedding photographers or cheapish regular telly. Mostly it's just another way of getting B roll. Rarely does it add to the overall content and understanding of the shows topic like below, from The Secret History of the British Garden, (presented by Monty Don, naturally).
Alice Anderson at the Wellcome Collection —
Things wrapped in copper thread. It’s a deceptively simple artistic process but the result is stunning. Helped along by the fantastic lighting design the ideas of concealment, repetition, abstraction, scale, and familiarity changed as you walked through the space and the pieces caught the light differently – interactivity at it’s simplest and effective. The images here show the range of scales the work takes, ‘Geometries 64 Shapes’, a collection of small objects on a wall, and ‘Ropes’, a 250m long installation that you could get inside and walk around.
I really liked how the thread brought the objects back to a collection of simple shapes, with what looked like dull planes and then as you moved they shimmered with texture. The original objects were physically there but, like a palimpsest, were ghosted and built on top of when given their copper lustre. My favourite piece wasn’t on a postcard: ‘Jars’ from Anderson’s site is below. Wellcome Collection link here.
