Inspired building design

Many of the winners of the recent Auckland Architecture Awards left me cold, but I LOVE this one! It's the Ironbank Development by RTA Studio. There are more views of it in The Architectural Review, and it looks amazing from all angles! It manages to be boxy and organic at the same time, quite an achievement.

New New Artland!

Each week TVNZ 7 show New Artland provides a New Zealand artist with the resources to make a new artwork involving their local community, and follows them around watching how it goes.

New Artland has just started it's second series, Saturday night at 9.35pm, TVNZ 7, and repeated Tuesday night at 9.35pm. It's hosted by music legend and art commentator Chris Knox, who completed filming the series before being incapacitated by a stroke from which he is still recovering.

Saturday night's show featured Wayne Youle organising a mass tattooing event where participants were tattooed with a NZ map marked with their particular home place or places. That episode is available online here.

All the shows from the first series are also available through the TVNZ On Demand website, here. Do have a look if you haven't seen them, they're such an amazingly diverse set of projects. And because all the artists are pushing the boundaries of what they've done before and also collaborating with their communities, the results are excitingly unpredictable.

The award for single most surreal idea must go to Phil Dadson with his project to send a brass band flying in a fleet of hot-air balloons drifting on the breeze.

The single funniest episode features painter John Reynolds wanting to personally mark and number all the road arrows on State Highway 1, before coming up with another idea which was equally amazing but less labour-intensive. If he ever gets sick of being an artist, I'm sure he could have a career as a stand-up comic.

The episode which moved me the most was Lonnie Hutchinson's Anzac Day work featuring thousands of pansies and tens of schoolchildren.

Hardest-working artists in series one would have to be Wellington duo Raised By Wolves (Amy Howden-Chapman and Biddy Livesey) with their project Popping the Tent, featuring their own handmade tent, 3,000 balloons, and a lot of campers talking about camping!

Some of the most interesting works involve teaching art to young people. Ans Westra's project recruited local Petone schoolchildren to record things that were important to them with disposable cameras.

Judy Millar coached a roomful of initially reluctant high-school students in painting on a large scale, using mops, buckets, and other unlikely implements.

There's lots of other great stuff. Go have a look, the list of programmes is here.

You *shall* be a mermaid!

If anyone remembers this story, about the double amputee who made a flippant remark at the beach:

"A little boy came up and started asking all the `why' questions about my legs (she was removing her prosthetic legs)," she says.

Rather than having to go through the logistics of amputation with a four-year-old, Vessey said: "Do you know about the Little Mermaid?

"He said he did, so I told him: `Well I'm a mermaid'."

(full story here)

Weta Workshop has actually made it happen. Nadya Vessey *is* a mermaid, look at that! A fully-functioning mermaid tail. Wow!

And the Close-Up video (interview and demonstration) is here.

Glass Invitational NZ at Canterbury Museum

Gallia Amsel: West Coast Surf 17 (2008), cast glass, sandblasted, acid etched & polished

The annual Glass Invitational NZ runs until February 8th at the Robert McDougall Gallery in the Botanic Gardens, and if you haven't seen it yet, you should get down there. It's a small but diverse show.

Particularly interesting to me were:

Elizabeth Thomson's Another Green World series of wall pieces, where spiny microbial forms emerge from depressions in a gently-moulded green landscape, which resembles 1950s upholstery.

Stephen Bradbourne's White linear bottles and White linear frond form, which are stunningly displayed in a black room by themselves, on a black pedestal with lights illuminating the white forms from below, so they glow. The glowing gourd-like bottle forms seemed full of life.

Elizabeth McClure's Domestic Science series, of scientific glassware decorated with floral and leafy patterns. The decoration is in some cases sandblasted onto the surface of the beakers and jars, and in some cases applied, creating the appearance of burnout velvet. The overall effect is subtly disquieting, a disconcerting mix of the clinical with the domestic.

Jim Dennison and Leanne Williams' Sophora Chandeliers, where cast kowhai blooms are suspended from glass brackets. I don't know if downlighting for these pieces was not available in this gallery, but they were displayed each with a glaring bulb in the centre, which destroyed the subtle play of light within the pieces that you can see on the website.

You can see all the pieces in the show illustrated here. But go and see it if you can, you get a lot more from walking around the artworks than you do from just looking at photos of them.

New Tim Main show

Tim Main is opening an exciting new show of sculptural works at the Milford Gallery in Auckland on November 5th. His recent works are elegant combinations of Gothic architectural forms and New Zealand native plants. Read all about the show here.

New Tim Main show

Tim Main's stunning, subtle designs based on New Zealand flora draw on the tradition of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, but have a gentle elegance all their own. His new show at CoCA is a must-see. It's on until the 20th July.

Ann Robinson

New Zealander Ann Robinson has been pre-eminent in the field of lost-wax glass-casting for a long time.

You can see examples of her beautiful work here. This series of tall vases is one of my favourites. And her flax pods are amazing!

She has a fascinating step-by-step description of the casting process, in a slideshow here.

Congratulations Lynn Kelly

Lynn Kelly has won the 2007 Dowse Foundation Gold Award for her jewellery. There's an interview with her here. You can see examples of her work, based on New Zealand native plants, at Fingers and Gallery 33.

Glenn Jones

New Zealand designer Glenn Jones has made a huge hit with his t-shirt designs on Threadless. There's an interview with him here, with examples of his hilarious work.