Work / Uncategorized

The Sultan’s Elephant

Words by Maya Davies, Thursday 07 April 2011

In October 2006, I travelled with some friends to Le Havre to feast our eyes on The Sultan’s Elephant, a peripatetic theatre event by Royal De Luxe. The exquisitely crafted, unbelievably life-like wooden puppets took the form of a young girl, and large elephant measuring up to 12 metres tall. The enchanting behemoths stood out against the post-war architecture, turning the whole city into an animated stage set for different narratives to unfold. Le Havre was one of many cities transformed into a dynamic backdrop for this beautiful piece of fairytale, which reminded us how to be children again.

Work / Uncategorized My 2014: Print Editor James Cartwright sums up the best bits of his year

This year feels like it was over before it even began – which is a total cliché but it’s God’s honest truth. It feels like just yesterday I was launched blinking and hungover into the first days of 2014 and now I couldn’t really tell you what I got up to. Anyway, it was a whirlwind, a rollercoaster ride full of emotional ups and downs, physical highs and lows, triumphs of spirit and ingestions of spirits. Yeah 2014, you were alright, I liked you, though at times you were a bit of a t**t.

James Cartwright — 19 December 2014
Work / Uncategorized Jeremy Deller, Clip Art and the It's Nice That annual in this week's podcast

This week we chat about the It’s Nice That Annual, Jeremy Deller’s encounter with Andy Warhol and waving a sad goodbye to the much-loved Microsoft feature: Clip Art.

Liv Siddall — 05 December 2014
Work / Uncategorized ECAL's website MAAD is a comprehensive archive of their MA in Art Direction

You could be forgiven for taking a cursory glance over the MAAD site, as I did, and assuming that it was dedicated to a design collective more diverse and comprehensive than we’d ever even seen before. Because that it kind of what it looks like. In fact, MAAD stands for Masters in Art Direction and belongs to ECAL, aka the Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne, in Switzerland, and the website serves as both a pamphlet for prospective students and an archive for the projects of previous ones, making it one of the best thought out university sites that we’ve ever seen.

Maisie Skidmore — 04 November 2014
Work / Uncategorized We love Tom Sewell's lunar calendar for his residency over on Post Matter

The difference between artists and normal proles is shown in the ease at which an artist can convey a very simple idea with visuals to make it shine. For instance this new work by our much-loved local artist Tom Sewell, in which he created a 31-day lunar chart when asked by digital art blog Post Matter to take part in a month-long residency. To me, Tom’s work is like having a toe constantly submerged in anonymous, otherworldly fluid – he takes the online world and melts it down until it resembles pools of history, typography and coding all glooped together into one. This series of serene planet GIFs gives me the same ambient pleasure as my desktop Mountain, and I’m going to keep up with this lunar July calendar even though it’s August tomorrow.

Liv Siddall — 31 July 2014
Work / Uncategorized Japanese artist Ryo Kuwabara's incredible eye-popping poster design

Ryo Kuwabara is a master colour coordinator and a geometric genius: scrolling through his Tumblr page, it’s kind of unbelievable when you realise that he has designed every single one of the decorative, eye-popping posters in the spectacular online portfolio. His work is space age but also early computer age, composed out of highly artificial patterns and rounded shapes that contain just a hint of Keith Haring. I’m not entirely sure what the posters are for, as the only English words that I can decipher are “Circuit Disarray” and “Blink” and “Symphony of the form,” but I do think that all of these words are very evocative of Ryo’s fantastically playful designs.

Madeleine Morley — 25 June 2014
Work / Uncategorized The new issue of art, culture and surfing magazine WAX has launched with a bang!

You don’t get much cooler than a fluorescent publication about art and surfing produced in Brooklyn, but luckily WAX magazine has proved itself not to just be another trendy rag, but a bonafide pleasure for all who see it. Take, for example, Printed Pages editor James Cartwright’s reaction when it plopped into the It’s Nice That offices the other day – he squealed like a little piggy and ripped off its plastic binding to flick through its fresh, untouched pages.

Liv Siddall — 19 June 2014