think-make-do-learn

Paper

2014-04-05T13:16:00.000+01:00

Just a pile of paper?*

Last year, I was lucky enough to catch The First Cut at Nottingham's Lakeside Art, an exhibition devoted to showcasing paper-based art. Beautiful paper cuts, sculptures large and small, a room transformed into a "Wonder Forest". Printer paper, newspaper, shopping bags and currency, books and card; the diversity of the exhibits was much greater than I had been expecting, especially considering the delicacy of their construction in some cases.

Rob Ryan was probably the only artist I had heard of beforehand- if you don't know the name, you may still be familiar with the reproductions of his paper cuts on mugs and cards available on the high street. I certainly appreciated the skill involved in creating the huge 3 metre papercut, The Map Of My Entire Life. First the sheer scale of this huge picture strikes you, then the tiny details of the town and grass draw you in before again marvelling at the looping chains, silhouettes of people and the incredibly detailed border.

Other artists' works included a life-size motorbike, flowerbeds, dresses, and spiralling plumes from floor to ceiling. World maps, hand grenades and guns made of currency, beautiful birds in flight and scenes carved out of books. Trees were formed from paper bags and paper scenes, sections staggered like miniature theatre sets evoked an air of the Fairy Tale about them - slightly fey, with a delicate beauty, Andrea Dezso's characters bordering on creepy.

It is difficult to pick a favourite, as I was delighted by many of the exhibits, but there are a few that come to mind first when recalling The First Cut. Béatrice Coron's Chaos City: each little window seemed so simply rendered, yet told it's own story - the thieves, the cocktail party, a family sitting down to dinner, the duel, and the film set.

Another favourite (slightly marred by the background sound in the gallery somewhat obscuring the narration) Going West by Andersen M Studio truly brought the pages to life: watch it below.

My favourite work by Peter Callesen, was the astonishing transformation of a single sheet of A4 paper into a tiny scene with huge impact. At first, I almost dismissed Mountain II as a sheet of crumpled paper, and was mildly disappointed. However on closer inspection there was something going on in the middle - what *was* that tiny thing? A person? Scaling a mountain? Wow.

Overall I was awed by the patience and dedication taken by all of the artists. We use paper every day in its more mundane and conventional forms: bank statements, reports, letters and shopping lists. Since The First Cut I certainly look at the reams of paper waiting to be churned through the printer a little differently. I wonder who is giving them a more exciting life elsewhere....

*NB - The photo is not of any of the exhibits, but a rather pretty pile of paper I spotted elsewhere.

Beautiful Science

2014-03-21T18:24:00.001+00:00

A wonderful exhibition, entitled Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight is currently on at the British Library in London, and shows how, useful, beautiful and elegant scientific data visualisation can be.

In some ways it is a shame that the exhibition was constrained to three areas: evolution, weather and disease - I would have liked to see some Chemistry and Physics in there too, as I am sure beautiful examples exist in all disciplines - but restricting it given the limited exhibition space, makes sense.

The first exhibit we came to was a visualisation of the currents across the world's seas and oceans - NASA's Perpetual Ocean. Although I knew some of the locations where I would expect bigger, faster moving currents (from news stories and general geographical knowledge) seeing them swirling across the globe illustrates the size of these areas far better than any words.

The interactive Tree of Life was excellent - and really brought a smile to my face once we realised you could start at the beginning and watch the tree grow and branch. The biggest limitation was my ability to zoom in quick enough to watch each little tendril I was interested in grow. Exhibited alongside illustrations of other evolutionary trees and taxonomic representations of species this shows what technology now allows and does so well - moving through time - and allowing the presenter, or interesting observer to pause at point of interest. In the case of the Tree of Life you can choose to delve deeper - find out more about the status of the species of interest, or continue to see where that branch split and evolved in to. Take a look for yourself at OneZoom.

Seeing Florence Nightingale's "Rose" diagram charting the incidence of deaths in the Crimean War due to "preventable, or mitigable zymotic diseases", "wounds" or "other causes", alongside Understanding Uncertainty's interactive version, where you could choose between the "rose", a bar graph or icons, really illustrated how effective her novel way of displaying the data was. The accompanying text provided a reminder that she was a keen Statistician - something which I'm sure I should have recalled, but didn't come to mind immediately.

Other highlights were
- Epidemic Planet which let you model the outcome of an infectious disease. Is is Summer or Winter? Where did it start? How infectious is it?
- Circles of Life by Martin Krzywinski showed genetic similarities between species by, if I remember correctly, linking common genes, each pair of chromosomes shown on its own Circos diagram.
-Weather Sentiment vs Reality, a comparison of tweets about the weather compared with the actual weather conditions in the Netherlands. I think seeing this for the UK would be even more interesting as we as a country are supposedly obsessed with the weather.

Whilst observing the ships logs, one including a beautiful illustration of a duck, it felt like you were looking at important documents. Whether they were viewed this way at the time or not, I don't know, but the obvious time taken over their preparation, possibly combined with few distractions at sea in those days, contrasts with what I imagine is a very slim likelihood that anyone takes time to record an entry in anything using beautiful copperplate script today. It often feels we barely have the time to scribble a shopping list in modern society, so a careful recording of the weather conditions, or the days notable events seems almost alien. Yet what is inspiring is that the care taken is now being utilised, and the meticulously recorded temperatures, wind speeds and locations, combined with other records from all over the globe to chart and model the changes over centuries. Will all of our digital recording be so accessible in 200 years time I wonder?

In my opinion, the real power of data visualisation is it can take thousands of observations, or a dry table of values, and turn them into something beautiful *and* meaningful.

You can take a look at a gallery of images from Beautiful Science on the Guardian website.

What's your favourite example of beautiful scientific data?

Over-thinking

2014-01-30T15:22:00.000+00:00

When I started this blog, I had lots of ideas. My brain said "Oooooh! I could write about, this! Or that! Or maybe even a series of posts! How exciting!" So I began. In my first post I said this blog was going to be about sharing those things that get me excited.

So what happened?

I started thinking. And writing. (There's a lot of partially started posts kicking around in my drafts folder.) And thinking.

Then worrying.

Maybe I didn't have anything useful to say that hadn't been said before? Or I couldn't figure out how to formulate that perfect phrase to describe my excitement. Never mind - no-one would be interested anyway. So I kept putting it off. I prioritised other things. I didn't even toy with writing another post.

But then I felt disappointed that I hadn't written anything. It had taken only a few weeks for those inner doubts to come and sabotage what was meant to be a fun project. And I let them.

So, enough.

There may not be polished prose or unique musings, but I will be thinking (constructively!), making, doing, learning - and sharing - here again.

Squeak, squeak, buzz

2013-12-15T20:12:00.000+00:00

When a box arrived at work, and I started grinning and clapping my hands together, I think my colleagues anticipated that the delivery was Christmas-related; a carefully picked gift, sparkly shoes for a Yuletide party, a festive jumper.

But no, the item bringing such a sparkle to my eye and joy to my heart was a mouse.

Not a toy for the cat, or food for a non-existent pet snake, or a computer peripheral, no, this was
the mighty Black and Decker Mouse.

I've sanded furniture with elbow grease, and know from experience that either the likelihood of sacrificing final finish for giving my arms a rest is high, or the time that the "work-in-progress" is sat around waiting for me to summon the willpower to tackle it again will increase. Given that I've been making over more furniture recently, this seem a good investment, and I was quite excited to try it out.

Not only is is easy to use - the shaped sandpaper is attached by Velcro* - but it has a hoover attachment for if you want to whisk away the dust. I must admit I was sceptical but on its first use this weekend I was impressed. Taking off some varnish and smoothing areas on a wooden coffee table was certainly a lot tidier compared to sanding a similar area on a bookcase a few months back - so much so that I did it all in the living room.

This is my first "power tool" (Yeah!!), bought by me, for me and it does what every good tool should - make the job easier. Now, what to use it on next..... Hmmmmm......

* NB: I saw a tip on an Amazon review that suggested keeping worn out shaped pads so that normal sandpaper could be cut to shape and glued as an alternative to purchasing the pricier pre-shaped replacements. This seems a useful and sensible idea, so worth repeating here.

Ikea Dombas Transformation

2013-12-08T13:15:00.001+00:00

I wanted a wardrobe. A big wardrobe. Going from a large amount of built in wardrobe space, to none, was not a disaster, but after 4 months of waking up and seeing clothes racks flanking the window, enough was enough.

Charity shop stock was too variable (both in size and style), new pieces too expensive, so something plain, which we could jazz up became the aim. The best compromise between function (space), looks and price, was the Dombas from Ikea, and you have to admit, it's not much of a looker....

The Ikea Dombas

In terms of other "Ikea Hacks", the Dombas has been transformed with a pretty stencil, chalkboard paint and fabric. This was my inspiration, a beautiful painted backdrop for a party, complete with step-by-step guide for how it was done.

Painted Backdrop from Celebrations At Home

Design-wise, it was important to me that the base pattern was symmetrical about the centre. After a quick brush over with sandpaper, and a coat of white (in case we did need to touch anything up later - at least then the paint would match the background), much measuring (and some remeasuring), we started laying the base squares/diamonds using frogtape.

Next we built up the motif from the backdrop. Originally I had intended to use this over the whole of both doors, but I quite liked the zig-zag we had created, and wanted to make a bit more of a feature of this.

This was the final taped pattern.

Painting time! I wanted a three colour pattern, rather than the two used in the backdrop, and after some sketching by hand, in the absence of better software, tried playing with different layouts in Powerpoint.

Although I used the Powerpoint designs as a guide, in the end it was a bit more intuitive, umm-ing and ah-ing, paintbrush in hand. In terms of the colours, I mixed two intermediate shades from the Annie Sloan Chalk Paints: Aubusson Blue and Old White.

Then it was the moment of truth - time to peel back the tape!

I loved the boldness of the final pattern, but for the third door, I wanted something plainer to surround some self-adhesive mirrors. Simple but pleasing.

Sealing the paint with wax (due to being chalk paint - more on this in a later post), and adding the mirrors, and I had my finished wardrobe. Woo hoo!

This felt like a big second project (the first being painting a small table in one colour) for a novice - there were definitely aspects that could have been improved - however, sometimes "done" is better than "perfect".

Done! (*big grin*)

White Space

2013-11-30T15:25:00.000+00:00

In common with roughly 25% of those resident in the UK, I live in a rented property and have done for roughly 6 years (11 if you count student accommodation too). Although I've lived in different types of properties - houses, flats, halls of residence - they have all had one common theme. White (or magnolia) walls.

White! Everywhere!

As much as I like clean lines, and light and airy spaces, I also like variety. I like patterns. I like colour.

As a teenager and student, I covered my walls with pictures, posters, photographs and any other items that could be easily affixed, just to make that space my own. At my parents' house, unlike at university, blu-tack was not banned, and once I grew out of the pink floral wall paper of my childhood, I tried to cover as much of it as possible.

My bedroom in my teens

Later it swung back to a cleaner blue with minimal things on the wall which I liked at the time as it was more "grown-up" and calm (you know teenagers, they can't wait to be "adults"). At university it was back to covering many surfaces with photos and postcards, mostly to put a bit of me into the identikit rooms.

Having escaped the university requirement of not damaging the walls, I discovered the joys of renting and tenancy agreements. Don't get me wrong - I full understand why most unfurnished rental properties are painted in white or pale shades. Not only is it cheaper than coloured paint, but you can put any colour with it and it works - no trouble with clashing soft furnishings or prospective renters being put off by the bright orange living room.

At first this was fine - partly constrained by budget and time - I lived, worked, bought things, sold and gave away other others, was given items - and the white walls were a barely considered backdrop. However about 2 years ago, finally living in quite a nice house (though probably not one I could afford to buy any time soon - in some ways renting spoils you!) I started feeling oppressed.

Yes, I could paint the walls and put up pictures, but always in the back of my mind were those clauses about returning the property in the same condition (excepting fair wear and tear). I felt like I was living in a world of blandness. Where had all the pattern and colour in my life gone? What could I do about it?

From a practical point of view the cost (both monetary and time) of adding colour by painting walls, when the likelihood was of being asked to paint them back to white again, was too much, so for a long time I did nothing. Occasionally I ranted about not being able to do what I wanted, but essentially I gave up.

I moved house again* and decided I would start doing things - one of which was making my home space a place I enjoyed living in, rather than a container I rattled around in.

I read books, articles, and blogs. I started looking around me for inspiration and discovered Pinterest, and became inspired by all the people out there doing the same thing, sometimes on a much smaller budget, sometimes on much bigger budget. And finally I started my own projects.

Painted by me...

Why didn't I do this before??

It is so much fun turning an unloved item or bland piece of furniture into something you like. I look at one item everyday and it makes me smile; not only because I love the way it looks but because I think "I Did That"! Ok, so personalising my living space is still a work-in-progress, but I now find inspiration everywhere (and far too many projects on my to-do list). What has been so exciting is not just the items, or the daily boost to my happiness when I see them, but also that fact I now get inspired in so many places I go - by patterns, by items in charity shops and by others online.

I'll be revealing what the pieces above actually are, and showing you their transformation from boring to beautiful, so, if you like what you've read, or the taster of what's to come (even if you can't guess what they are yet!), then please pop back later.

*The irony is, that this last move was to a house that has very little white. Woo hoo! I thought I would love it - but in reality, I have had a fair few "Ugh! Who would choose to do their house in neutral browns and beiges, ugh! They don't go with x and y." moments. You live, you learn.... still can't be bothered to repaint though.

Things

2013-11-28T21:08:00.000+00:00

I get excited about things.

Sometimes I get very excited about things.

It is usually quite easy to tell when I am excited about things as I start waving my hands around, jump up and down or start talking far too fast.

To begin with, this blog will be the digital equivalent of me with a big grin on my face, waving my hands around, bouncing up and down on the balls of my feet, sharing with you those things that get me excited:

Things I think about.
Things I make.
Things I do.
And possibly most importantly, things I learn.

I hope you'll get excited too.