Plastic Fantastic

These necklaces by French multi media artist Blandine Bardeau, make me spring happy! I have a huge jewellery collection, and do not necessarily demand from my jewellery, that it is actually wearable - of course lots of it is, but other pieces are just loved by me for other qualities: sculptural beauty, some fun way of using materials or fine craftsmanship. 

These are probably mostly showpieces, made from soft plastic tubes and from around 2012. I like what she does with the material, and I like the reference (as always) to African tribal jewellery. Blandine is a very versatile artist, she does all kinds of work, and now primarily paints, it seems.
Check her out here.

Yellow

When Easter is near, the color yellow is everywhere. Such a feast for the eyes! I love yellow. Back in the Easter 2015, I made yellow himmeli from plastic straws and a bit of yarn. And my son got a yellow helium balloon at some event. It even had eyes...

Last year, I was very busy around Easter, and only found the time to post something about these paper flower balls I made, when Easter was long over. 

So I'll re-post them here - they are a yellow and slightly re-designed version of these. I made them a bit smaller, and more buttercup like, and they are super easy to make. They consist of 12 identical petals with slits, and you just slide them together, to form a ball. Add a string if you like, and hang them from a pretty branch.

Print the petals on regular A4 paper - and print on both sides of the paper.  

Get the PDF here, with printing instructions and all.

 

2021 update: find links for the downloads in the post from 2016.

Architecture bucket list: Saarinen/Bertoia chapel at MIT

In my childhood home we had four large coffee table books (from a time before such books became common). They were bound in crimson pleather, and must have had colourful dust jackets, that must have gone missing at some point. To me, they were just 'the red books'. They were photo books with themes such as 'Fantastic Buildings of the World', 'Nature's Wonders' - and that sort of thing, you get the picture. And that was just the point: they were full of the most stunning full colour pictures, from LIFE magazine and National Geographic, as far as I remember. I clearly see, that much of my curiosity, my lust for travel and interest in architecture comes from getting lost in those books, hours on end. 

The books themselves are gone now, but I regularly have a moment of "where on earth have I seen this before, I know this from somewhere....? Aaaaaah, of course. I saw a photo in The Red Books!" 

This is exactly what I thought, when I saw an image of the wonderful hanging sculpture/room installation/altar backdrop, Harry Bertoia made for Eero Saarinens small chapel at the M.I.T. campus in Massachusetts (built in 1955). In one the aforementioned red books, there was full page of this fantastic cascading sculpture, and it was a particular favorite of mine. The utter simplicity of the idea, the way this feature in the space is almost alive and magical, like a waterfall of light or snow or flower petals.....

The windowless round brick building itself, is very simple (but has lots of lovely details in the brick- and wood work). The only natural light comes from the giant skylight above the altar, which is simply a white marble cube.

Now see for yourself (and there are a few links and a bit more info after the pictures).

All images are sourced from this very well written article from archdaily.com - read the article here, if you want to know more about this small, peculiar and stunning building:

AD Classics: MIT Chapel / Eero Saarinen

In honour of persistent, unapologetic women everywhere

There are so many wonderful and awe-inspiring stories to share on March 8th, thank god, and so many platforms that does that so much better than this one. But I have long wanted to post these absolutely stunning, powerful and remarkable portraits of Tina Turner, and she will be my inspirational, aspirational sisterhood poster woman today. 

Anna Mae Bullock aka Tina Turner: always an idol of mine, definitely a nasty woman, a fighter and such a real human. These photos are from 1969, and are by Jack Robinson (read more after the pictures). 

Jack Robinson, the photographer who shot this series in New York in 1969, had a really interesting story, it turns out. I Googled him, because I wanted to credit these images correctly, and came across  his unusual life story. 

In the 1960s, he was a superstar fashion, celebrity and journalistic photographer in his native New Orleans and in New York, but in the mid 1970s, his career started to decline for a number of reasons, addiction being one of them.

He left New York to care for his elderly parents in the South, gave up photography for good, became sober - and started out on a second career, one in which he seems to have excelled almost as much as in the first: he started working in a company that made stained glass windows, and became amazingly good at that!

He lived in Memphis, Tennessee and made stained glass windows (winning awards and all kinds of praise for that as well) the last two decades of his life, and when he died in 1997, only few people knew about his early career as a photographer. But boxes and boxes of neatly preserved and catalogued negatives and contact sheets were found in his flat, and he was discovered all over, resulting in book publications, exhibitions and so on.

Here is a bio, and here is an article about the re-discovery of his work, after his death.