Them Apples

One season is certainly insufficient for transformation into domestic gods and goddesses. I'm used to toil on the allotment so the unchecked plenitude of fruit trees was overwhelming. Too busy to bake, most of the apples rotted on the ground and gave my guilt a vinegary piquance.

Odds Off

With 10 thousand of the UK's 61.838 million living in Ludlow, chances are you'll not be in Shropshire's beautiful market town this coming month. But, if you are, don't be surprised to feel the effects of some Unplanned Magic as Kate Gibb and Marcus Walters get together for twinned exhibitions at dual venues, Black Bough and Material.

Unplanned Magic, 8th Oct-5th Nov
Black Bough, 2 Market Street, Ludlow SY8 1BP
Material, 131 Corve Street, Ludlow SY8 2PG

Zzzz

Given our sitter's wakefulness, I hesitated to name our new print Catnap, then I figured an immutable feline essence means all cats are only ever seconds from a snooze.

No. 4

Not only have the folk at Poundshop launched their online pop-up shop (i.e. it ain't there forever), during London Design Week they'll be filling a physical space with retail goodies too. Divided into £1, £5 and £10 categories from a host of top designers (including yours truly in the 'Liberty Picks'), it's worth braving the British weather for.

Alma Showroom
12-14 Greatorex Street
London E1 5NF
16th-19th Sept, 12-6pm

• Richard Hamilton (1922-2011) with Epiphany, 1964

TD11

Trade fairs tend not to be the most exciting venues but this week's Top Drawer came pretty close to fun; catching up with our favourite stockists and making a few friends. Our new print was well received too, especially by cat-crazy folk like the excellent illustrator, Helen Hancocks (evidenced below). Thanks to everyone who dropped by!

Autumn / Winter

Forget hibernation, they'll bearly be time for a sandwich this weekend as we prepare for Top Drawer Autumn trade fair. Do come and visit if you can bear it, but look out for your lunch... hard work makes us extra-hungry!

Top Drawer Autumn/Winter
11-13 Sep 2011
Olympia
Hammersmith Road
London W14 8UX

This Lisa

Last week the British Library got in touch for a small biog, something to differentiate this Lisa Jones from all the others catalogued in their system. Seems they have copies of the books we illustrated for Joanna Skipwith's Silver Jungle, I Choose You! and I'd Chew You!

Above is a cheesy spread that never matured to selection.

3 Cheers

London's N16 rang with the raising of glasses this week, toasting many happy anniversaries for Malissa Jones and (the other) James Brown.

• The kitsch old card is by Hallmark but special credits should also go to Ben, Irene, Zack & Coco for making space for us in the family home!

Crazy Legs

Better than finding folding cash in an old coat pocket, searching for something unrelated this week I turned up a discarded illustration. Clearly dissatisfied with this fella when I filed him away, I'm quite keen now... mix some inks and tweak some colours and I may even have a new card design!

Clean Sweep

Seeing press shots of the post-riot clean-up campaign in London this week, it was great to see the broom brandished by crowds as symbol of repair and weapon of resistance against further social decay. I'm put in mind of the arch social sculptor himself, Joseph Beuys.


• Joseph Beuys, Silberbesen und Besen ohne Haare (Silver Broom and Brush with no Hair), 1972 • Joseph Beuys, Ausfegen (Sweeping Up), 1972

E9 BYE

Topographically speaking Hackney Wick is no island, though, sandwiched between the A12 and the River Lea, it often feels like one. This week we finalised our tactical retreat from London and broke down the print studio... just as everybody else was setting up the weekend's Hackney WickED Festival. We've met more great people in the final few weeks than we did during the two years prior, making it especially difficult to leave.
Occasionally popping to the Pearl for refreshments, we picked up some free papers as keepsakes. Issue 1 of The Hackney Wick skits on the vagaries of the area with cultural assessment from Iain Sinclair and local teens alike. The Cut is part of a broader project which takes an archival approach in mapping the area's socio-economic history (including Speedway, a few failed visions for the future and, ironically, Class War's resistance to gentrification) while simultaneously putting paid to the notion that successive generations obliterate the memory of their forebears.

Objecthood

You don't need to visit a museum to see the way humans invest objects with symbolic currency. An incorrigible hoarder, I've lately tried to penetrate layers of sentiment and see the useless tat beneath. The process puts me in mind of a 36-panel Chris Ware piece which tells the episodic, cyclical tale of a table lamp.



In the 18th century a literary style sprang up around this approach to objecthood, called It-Narratives. Anthropomorphic versions of these narratives tell the fiction "from the perspective of the objects themselves, others use them as hubs around which other characters’ stories are spun."[1].



• Chris Ware, Acme Novelty Library #2, summer 1994

• Clifford Still, Lucian Freud (1922-2011), British Vogue 1948

Wishful Living

We were quite happy to be moving to an old post mill until a friend lent us the fantastic Converted Into Houses (Charles A. Fracchia, Thames & Hudson, 1977). Not only did we have to pack and shift it, it brought on a profound bout of space envy too. It consoles me that, almost like savages, none of these homes had an internet connection.

 

• Cigar Factory, New York (x2)
• Lumberyard, California
• Industrial Building, Paris
• Icehouse, Connecticut (x2)
• Cannery, Monterey
• Butterscotch Factory, London

Going, Going, Gone

We may have mentioned it a million times already but, hey, this is a web-log after all! Not much in the way of idle chit-chat this week, just the hard graft and residual doubts* of imminent relocation.

* Actually, this is a crass understatement, we're both completely incapacitated and Edward —a born Londoner— is queazy green with fear.

So Long, Stuff

This week we began dismantling our lives in the promise of reconstructing them elsewhere afresh. Obviously this starts with a radical de-clutter on that latterday Bonfire of the Vanities, eBay. A Maclamp gave good return alongside an old Routemaster destination blind, but David Hicks books got a huge consumer thumbs-down.

Of all the lots though, I was especially sorry to say so long to a cache of posters (mostly travel & tourism from the 1960s but also this WVS public information number from 1956), a totally 80s Janette Beckman photographic print I found on the street, and a heap of wonderfully pretentious art books we'll realistically never read.

• Janette Beckman, Rosemarie, LA 1981
• The Women’s Voluntary Service was set up in 1938 to augment the work of the ARP. This campaign dates from the early years of the Cold War and was instigated ‘to inform one in five of the women between the ages of 16 and 70 in Great Britain of the simple things they could do to protect their homes and families in the event of nuclear attack – should it ever come.’ [Source: District Nursing Archive]

• Richard Hamilton's typographic version of Marcel Duchamp's The Green Box (1934), 1975 (3rd edition of 2500)

Couch Potato

Don't tell the Tories, but I'd pay my TV licence for radio content alone. A bonus then, that Adam Curtis's All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace has been showing these past three weeks on BBC2. If there's an equally compelling counter-thesis, it couldn't be put together with the same abstract, awkward elegance.

Neither did the series culminate in one catch-all, cosy conclusion, it simply finished... with everything still in chaos and the viewer all-at-sea. Luckily there's local hero Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle too, which has been like some acerbic kind of antidote; I can pat myself on the back and laugh at the same time.

Bawden Abroad

Here's some mid/late-period Edward Bawden. Stylistically, they're bolder and more decorative than the studies popularised today. Also altered by the intervening years is their subject, Portugal. The target of violent gangs, visiting Brits were this week urged vigilance.



Motif 9 (1962, Shenval Press) is one of so many wonderful books I nabbed from Griffith & Partners on Great Ormond Street. For years I'd tweak my cycle route to take in their curb-side curios. The owners disavowed the internet age as a torment of listings, trips to the post office and 'customer service'. Now it's an espresso bar.