Visiting ARoS part three - Your Rainbow Panorama

As I mentioned the other day, I had to cover Your Rainbow Panorama in a separate post, mainly because it looks so gorgeous that you take a thousand pictures, and then a few just doesn't do it. It is a surprisingly elegant and minimalist structure, and a quite vertiginous experience to walk around in the dizzying, psychedelic color cloud, where the fantastic view of the city gets this eerie and unreal quality, because of the intense color filter you see it through. 

The roof terrace under the panorama walkway is a great place to hang out as well, and the whole thing is basically a do-not-miss must, if you go to Aarhus. I will not attempt to interpret Olafur Eliasson's artistic intention here, but the whole building is said to be a paraphrase of Dante's Divine Comedy, and the panorama is supposed to be the Paradiso. I think?

Here we are, perhaps in Paradise. The weather was great, that's for sure.

Happy birthday, Daisy*

It is Queen Margrethe's 75th birthday today, and it is celebrated everywhere. Here she is, on the cover of a big Danish weekly woman's magazine - and one of the best covers they have had for a long time (fine work by photographer Les Kaner). She is a great looking 75 year old, and I have to say that even though I am not a royalist or monarchist, even, I have a soft spot for this quirky, tall, chain smoking aristocrat. She is something else, all right, and I acknowledge her enormous importance for Denmark as a quite edgy and hard-to-miss PR person. So, happy birthday to you, Daisy!

*Daisy is her very official nickname, and one handed down to her her by her parents when she was a girl (it was originally her Swedish maternal grandmother Margareta's nickname. It is a word play between girl's names and the Danish end English names for the flower), and the daisy has become her signature flower. I think we are going to see a LOT of daisies today! Even the iconic Georg Jensen brooch was named after her, and modeled after her grandmother's original gold, diamond and enamel brooch from Stockholm. That daisy has a lot of history, and you won't find many Danes that can't tell you at least some of it.

Visiting ARoS part two - go see some art!

We mainly went to see Something Strange This Way - Janet Cardiff & Georges Bures Miller, and you can too, but you really have to hurry (it ends on April 19th). For the rest of this year you can see Out of the Darkness, a curated view on some of the works from the ARoS collection, and The 9 Spaces in the basement will be arranged as they are now, until late 2016. Which means that you can see - among many, many other things - the fantastic Shirin Neshat video installation (which you should, even though it is more than an hour long). See a bit about the stunning ARoS building in part one.

Here are some glimpses from four very intense hours the other day:

From top:

Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller: The Carnie (2010)
Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller: Opera for a Small Room (2005)
Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller: Storm Room (2009)
Carsten Höll: Sphäre Rosa (2001)
Maurizio Nanucci: My Sense of Your Sense of Language (1994)
Tracey Moffatt: Doomed (2007)
Tal R: Rumdi, rumdi, rumdi (1989-2013)
Shirin Neshat: Women Without Men (2004-08)
Olafur Eliasson: Your Atmospheric Colour Atlas (2009)
Olafur Eliasson: Omgivelser (2007)
Mariko Mori: Tom Na H-ui (2006)
Olafur Eliasson: Your Condensation (2013)
Tony Oursler: Unk (2004)

Visiting ARoS part one - the place

The funny thing about living in Copenhagen is that you live quite far away from the rest of Denmark, even though you do live in the capital. Which is one of the main reasons I still hadn't gotten around to visiting the impressive ARoS modern art museum in Aarhus. Somehow, spontaneously, it was decided that my sister and her family were going in Easter, and I managed to squeeze myself into the car, and off we went. It was a great experience, it really exceeded my expectations, and I would warmly recommend a visit, should you be in the neighborhood.

I like how the building (architects: Smith, Hammer & Lassen, 2004) doesn't try to be light or 'easy' to grasp visually, it is massive, solid and perched on a hilltop in the middle of Aarhus, and you see glimpses of it hovering over the city everywhere. On top it is adorned with Olafur Eliassons Your Rainbow Panorama (I will get back to that in a separate post) which is kind of shiny and out of place looking on the dense building. And yet, somehow, it works. It's weird and not very Danish, and I like it.

As you can see, the rainbow is even visible from inside the museum, here it is reflected on a nearby building. It has truly become a landmark, and this view from a bit away is quite stunning:

Once inside the building, it is a totally different experience: it is white, spacious and full of surprising vistas and angles. I could argue that it is perhaps a bit confusing and you tend to forget which floor you are on, but that's to do with the wayfinding design, which could be much better. But see how bright and airy it looks:

That is the famous Boy by Ron Mueck you glimpse at the bottom of the vertigo provoking glass atrium. You see him from many angles and heights, and he is really something to see, I discovered. Read much more about him here. 

My nephew and brother-in-law taking in the Boy. He is HUGE!

We also liked that they have a bring-your-own-picnic-space. I wasn't large, but the big yellow sculpture you can use as a bench / table / play area is cool.

It was a lovely Easter

And now it's over. Back to the goldmine, so to speak. We had a lot of guests, some sun, I took a great trip to Arhus, and had a bit of crafting fun, even though I don't see where I found the time.

As you can see, there is always some kind of Easter Tree thing going on in some corner, this year on my beloved birch branch (dry and old, but I can't bring myself to throw it out). 

I had some yellow paper flowers (from a shop), but they looked a bit lonely. So I made some very yellow Easter Himmeli (well, why not?), and got into making flower pompoms, which is something I have been wanting to try for a long time. I saw them on the brilliant blog Mr Printables, and they are such fun to make. A bit tricky, so follow the instructions very carefully.

Here is Mr Printables Flower Pom-Pom tutorial - and here are my first attempts!

Not Very Egg Shaped Eggs

My son and I sent out an almost obscene amount of 'gækkebreve' or Easter fools letters - read more here - and the result is not yet quite certain, but we have to be prepared. We may have to cough up with a lot of Easter eggs this year. I like the pretty store bought hollow paper eggs a lot, but they cost almost more than the candy you fill them with, so I came up with these little boxes instead.

They are quickly made, and can contain a pretty generous handful of candies. I have made the print with four pretty spring like patterns, and instead of printing them on white, I played around with different colors I found in the drawer. I printed the boxes on the kind of cheap card stock you can buy everywhere, and that works well in most printers (= hobbykarton, thin cardboard / carton / cardstock: about 200 g).

Download the triangle sweet boxes PDF right here!

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Dragonflies box  /  Pine needles box  /  Cherry blossom box

Palm Sunday and start of daylight saving time

It's Palm Sunday today, and Easter begins. We have a big Easter lunch party today, and we have a ten day holiday before us - not that we will be going away to any exotic locations, we will slave away in our garden, spring clean a bit indoors and air out everything.

The best thing today: Daylight saving time starts, yaay! And most Danes wake up, trying to remember the clever little rule about the garden furniture (it's hard to translate, but it is this little memorizing trick: when spring comes, you move the garden furniture 'forwards', from the garden shed. Just like the clock - see? And in Autumn you move the furniture back. I find it totally smart, before I learned that little trick my mind was always at a loss).

I love palms. I have have yet to visit Los Angeles, but to me, these palm lined boulevards are so iconic. I have seen palms here and there, and the way they silhouette against the sky is so beautiful, and plays so well with all kinds of architecture. The wonderful sensation of picking up fresh coconuts from the sidewalk (as we did in Miami) and fallen leaves as big as yourself. It is just magic, to this Scandinavian, anyway!

Here are some black and white versions (to illustrate the my point about the silhouettes better) of palms in Marrakech (top), Addis Abeba (middle) and Miami. Addis Abeba is actually much more about eucalyptus trees, but the street we stayed in, had these lush gardens behind all kinds of ramshackle fences, and the graceful palms sort of hovered over all the dense greenery. In Marrakech, as in Miami, palms are just everywhere, and the great thing is when you see the whole, slender trunk. In the image beneath taken in front of the Koutoubia Mosque, they are painted white at the base, so pretty.

Everytime I see this book from Taschen (Taschen always make me wish I had endless book shelves, funds and hours of leisure), I think about getting it. It's a bit pricey, and having an extremely nerdy book of botanical illustrations of palms is not my highest priority, but I will probably end up giving in to it, some day.

The last image is my son running towards a pink sunset on what almost looks like a beach in paradise. It was actually in Key Largo, and not paradise at all, but when you faced the ocean and the little palm grove, it was glorious. 

Here's to longer, sunnier days!

Cheerful little birds

Easter is near, so of course I have a little bit of paper fun for you, to celebrate spring or... just because I can?

Last year we made origami bunnies (we even inflated them) and this year I have made you some happy little birdies, perhaps for the Easter table or perhaps to put in a 'gækkebrev', an Easter Fool's Letter - I wrote about those as well, last year.

I had some fun making these sheets that come alive, tweet tweet, when you fold them - these birds start out looking, for instance, like this.....

 

They are super easy to make, and I have made you  a tutorial as well. I scaled some of them 80% when I printed them, to make them in two sizes. You might try that as well? Or even smaller!

Click here to download the tutorial and four different little sparrows.

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Tutorial  /  Design 1+2  /  Design 3+4