Fiction chromatically

Tidying up books. After moving house multiple times and getting rid of a lot, I've got a weird selection left. Also photostitch likes the break the laws of physics.

British Museum

Last week I paid a trip to the British Museum. I had a review of work day at uni for my research project (I'm doing a research/practice based MA in Sequential Design) and I felt like I should do something substantialish on the visual research side.

My project's making animated films based on selected stories from Ovid's Metamorphoses, and I'd had the idea of doing some of the films based on related periods of greek art, avoiding 5th century Athens. So for instance Icarus would be based on Minoan styles, anything to do with the Trojan war Mycenaean, Adonis would be based on Assyrian art (it's a fairly common theory that the Greeks borrowed the story off the Assyrians) etc etc.

My plan was to head into London earlier and spend some time drawing stuff in situ, and then meet up with my friend Michael in the afternoon after he'd finished his lecture at uni. The whole gutter then fell off the side of the house so I had to hang around waiting for the building manager to arrive to look at it, so I didn't arrive at the museum til 3ish, so I only had time to take pictures. I then realised I had a stupid small memory card in the camera, so I only took pics of the things I needed for uni. All the pictures are of pre-classical Greek art or Assyrian art, although we did look at quite a lot of the other stuff in the museum (stuffed crocodiles and calves especially). I've got a reflection problem in quite a few of the pictures, and some aren't as sharp as they could be, but I was in a hurry to get everything I needed.



Cycladic statues, about 3000 years old





Minoan pots. The Minoans were really into octopuses. Let's be pedantic and call them octopodes, eh? οι οκτοποδες. There, putting that education into some use.



The Mycenaeans on the other hand, preferred their bling.



Mycenaean heads.



Mycenaean birds.



Archaic pottery (ie the period right before what people think of as Ancient Greece)





I love the expressions on these little figurines. I wonder if the potter was bored?



Red figure pottery.



Black figure pottery.





Michael inspecting a giant scarab in the Egypt gallery.



Assyrian lamassu gatepost. Giant man-bird-lion-bull thing. One of my favourite things in the museum. I took loads of detail pictures for drawing.



Mural of a king lion hunting. He's so hard he can strangle lions with one hand. I also took a lot of detail pictures of assorted dying lions here.



My favourite dying lion. Ooh me back!



I like the way they carve trees like feathers.



I love this griffin guy's expression.

Good fun had by all. I like museums.

Address

If you want to send me nice stuff, send it to:

Emma F c/o Studio 2,
Coachwerks, 19 Hollingdean Terrace,
Brighton, BN1 7HB
...
If you turn up with a severed rabbit's head and your undying love, you'll be disappointed. It's not where I live.

Halloween night

So I didn't do anything Halloweeny on the Saturday night, so I felt like I should do something of some sort on the Sunday night. A few friends came round, we drank a fair bit and listened to records. There's a Ghost in My House- the Fall, about half of Spiderland, and Trail of Dead.



L-R Vicky, Amy, Jack.



Mein haus, before people came. The vertigo picture and flokati rug are mine, the other furniture was there when I moved in.



I found that chair on the street and bought a cushion for it. It needs a new cover, it's currently just got a duvet cover draped over it. The Nightmare before Xmas cushion usually resides on my bed. My housemate has a very very good stereo.



Me & Rachael had plans for undead Daria & Jane Lane, but she couldn't come out all weekend because she had to agonise over an important essay, so I got my standard halloween outfit out. Prim little dead girl dress that Bryony gave me for xmas a few years ago, and large amounts of makeup (it was dark purple and black in real life, with the shiny bits silver and green glitter)



I'm against Halloween outfits that are too everyday pretty, you've got to look a bit eerie. How often do I get to cover my face in black eyeshadow? Well, maybe it's a look I could take up, but I'd rather not.



Amy brought a pumpkin cheesecake decorated with lurid orange icing and rubber cockroaches. Brilliant.



Amy & familiar.



Jack wasn't very happy at being forced into cat ears. I guess he's not a fan of costumes.



Idiot.



I look ridiculously smug here.



Jack wanted to learn the guitar, so I taught him 4 chords and the powerchord. He can start two punk bands now. He took to it pretty well. Yes, the guitar is lurid silver.

White Night 2010- all night arts festival

On Saturday I went to White Night rather than doing anything big for Halloween. It's an all night art festival in Brighton on the night the clocks change. I knew some people who were doing stuff in it, and there was plenty of interesting stuff to come across anyway.



I met up with Vicky and Jack and we had a wander.



We went to the Open Market first. It usually sells vegetables and second hand bikes and junk, but it had been set up with all different art stands and lights for the evening. There's a woman blowing giant bubbles here, but you can't really see her.



There were installations and music and all kinds of things going on.



I really liked these shadow lamps.



Closeup.







Gallit, another student on my course, was doing an installation called The Big Draw. She had cut out loads of cardboard shapes and pinned them to the walls. Passers-by were invited to take a shape, paint it with indian ink and hang it back up on the wall and also to add marks to the projection.









Mine kind of ended up being a sort of skeletal seahorse type thing.



I also ran into Mark from my course.



Then we went along to St Peter's Church where my friend Sophie was doing shadow puppets with projections in a tent for a band called Us Baby Bear Bones.



At the side of the tent was a place where you could colour in a picture of a monster.



On the way to the seafront we popped into Cafe Marwood, which was opening all night. My favourite cafe anyway.



They'd hung strings of paper cranes across the garden.



I caught myself a bird.



Aren't I clever. Me & V made plans to make a lot of origami birds and string them up in the studio ourselves.

We wandered down to the seafront and saw all sorts of things like enlightenment booths (like a confession one, except you learn things inside), a big pink tent for thinking in (we didn't do any thinking, stuck to drinking vodka out of plastic lemonade bottles) 80s dancers dancing on the bandstand, a giant bubble suspended from a crane with projections inside, assorted street performers and musicians and some really big queues for indoor stuff that we couldn't be bothered to join. A good way to spend an evening.