Into the Hourglass

Posts have been a bit thin on the ground here lately. Mainly because I've been super busy with the meadow (which has been incredible) and life/work/moving flat has been getting in the way of making stuff. So to (sort of) make up for it, here are some pics of costumes I helped out on for The Hourglass Social Club. I put up sketches for this a little while back, but they haven't been made yet, so these were a kind of stop-gap. To be fair, a friend did the bulk of the actual costuming, and I chipped in by doing the styling and making some accessories: The Pickled Shopkeeper's beard, a ripped rag petticoat and bustle for the pie seller, and a sort of weird hairpiece/hat thing made from a platinum hair weave. Which sounds wrong, but looked awesome! I'll finish up the other costume bits shortly, probably. And I'll post them soon, kind of.

G is for Guerrilla

Urban gardening is taking over my life a bit at the moment. So hot off the heels of the Mabley Green meadow, I did a bit of guerrilla gardening with my meadow co-conspirator Rowland, and floral-intervention celebrity Richard Reynolds. Who's really nice!

I have to say, gurerilla gardening is sooooooo much easier than permissive, inclusive gardening. From start to finish, it took two hours to seed a big strip of ground and a huge mound of rubble. And it meant we got to do fun stuff like climb 10 foot fences and scramble around on demolition sites. Though doing so gave me a gnarly, guerrilla-sized bruise on my knee.

No pics (apart from this one I took on my way home). But more to come if/when our seeds grow.

Food Fight!!!!!

Yes. That's right. Count those exclamation marks. They're there for a good reason - we're having a party soon for my 30th. And it's the party I've been dreaming of for years - a food fight party!(!!!!)

More details/pics will be up soon. But until then, here's the flyer. Can't wait!

The Hourglass Social Club

My friend Karim's been putting on extravagant parties for a while now. But he's about to go supersonic. His latest venture is the The Hourglass Social Club - 'a time travelling odyssey through London's illustrious past' - with a fair bit of gin drinking/tomfoolery/frenzied dancing thrown in too.

He's putting a big effort into set dressing the venues and wants the nights to be a visual feast, so he asked me to do the costumes for him. Exciting!

The idea is that each event is one in a series of episodes following the adventures of three central characters: The Pickled Shopkeeper (who turned pickling and preserving into a science, making his Newington Green shop famous) and his two protogés (the Lazarus Twins, who were taken in as orphans and are now life and spirit the business). You can read about the set up here. But if you'd rather look at pictures, flex that itchy scrolling finger and take a look at my initial sketches for their outfits.

Rather than creating everything from scratch, I'm just going to concentrate on making slightly weird accessories and twist up the styling a little. Then hire/scrounge the rest. So for the shopkeeper, I'm making a long plaited beard festooned with pickled and preserved objects. Then as the twins have grown up around pickled things, my concept is that as a result, they're subconsciously and irresistably drawn to the preserved. So Max always wears some leather, and Gracie wears fur. Come along - it'll be fun!

Mabley Green Meadow

At the same time as pushing for the Fitzrovia meadow from a couple of posts ago, I started pushing to do another one somewhere a bit closer to home. So close in fact, that I've been staring at the area in question from my kitchen window for months thinking 'someone should really do something with that space'.

Essentially, it's a pretty big but generally neglected piece of grass between a row of houses and a motorway overpass. Nobody really uses it (apart from dog walkers who stand at the edges and usually and totally co-incidentally checking their watches/bend down to tie their shoes/looking elsewhere at the EXACT same moment their dog is doing it's nasty business). Then job done, they leave.

So it's not an area that's loved or cared for. But on a recent set of plans for the neighbourhood in general, it was designated as a 'community garden'. Nobody really knew what that meant, least of all the Council. So I leapt into action and proposed it become a wildflower meadow. And after much wrangling and hand-wringing, it's happening! Which is where most of my time and energy has been going in the last couple of months. And while it's been much more work than I thought, it's been great and I've met some lovely people.

I could have posted about the process endlessly here, because there's been a lot to make and do for it. But as it's a community project and there, doens't or shouldn't really belong to me, I've become a media mogul and made a whole new blog for it.

www.mableymeadow.blogspot.com

Take a look and let me know what you think - of it you live in Homerton or Hackney Wick, come get involved in one of our volunteering or fun days!

In the mean time, here's one of the many iterations of funding proposals we put together to get the money together to make it happen.

Fitzrovia Meadow

OK, OK. I know it's been aaaaaages since I've put anything up on here. But I have a good reason: I've been busy. Really busy. It's been great! For some reason, rather than tiring me out, it's been making me pile more onto my plate instead. Here's what absorbed quite a bit of my time a couple of months back. It was an idea to turn the big (now derelict) lot on Mortimer St in Central London into a field of wildflowers. It's really possible to do. Though only if the developer says yes. But after much harassing and sleuthing to find the right people to talk to, they said no. Well, they didn't really - they just stopped replying. Then sold the land to another company, who's going to build a car park. All I can say is it'd better be a totally kick ass car park. Grrrrr.

Anyway, here's the proposal we made to get their attention. It had to be pretty comprehensive (hence the length). And I really wanted it to look good, so I got super into making the little photoshop illustrations at the bottom of the pages. So there are lots of little details in there - though you might not see them at blog-friendly sizes. Muchos gracias to Simon (my Art Director) for doing the design for me. I can be a pretty demanding (read: pedantic) creative director but he was very patient. Bless him.

Visas suck

The only problem with not being born in England is trying to live here when you're a grown up. Staying for a few months is easy. But after that, you have to leap through flaming hoops for nine (yes NINE) years before you get a passport to call your own.

So in the spirit of visas sucking, two sisters (one who's just had her application rejected, and another who's finally had hers accepted) held a Visas Suck Party for the last weekend they were both going to be legal residents in London. And they asked me to help out. Which, of course, I did.

The theme was 'non EU'. So we had a Columbian drug mule, a New Zealand sheep and a bit of Russian new money floating around. Alice (the sister with the visa) and I (a bona fide passport holder) were border patrol. We spent the night interrogating all the dirty foreigners arriving at the party, then stamping their invites (custom made passports) with 'ACCEPTED' or 'REJECTED' stamps. It was awesome.


No party is complete without a bit of dance-floor accessories. So we had a giant visa, complete with mug-shot hole. One side was stamped ACCEPTED - hooray!, the other side REJECTED - boooo!

Audrey Roger at Way East

I live in Hackney Wick in London. Which, if I'm honest, is a bit of a dump. But the rent is super-cheap. And as a result, it has more artists per square meter than anywhere else in Europe. Which completely makes up for it. Anyway, I'm in a slightly rambling mood today so I'll cut to the chase and say that once a year, Hackney Wick is sort of transformed into a weekend-long art opening/street party for Hackney Wicked. And this year, I curated a show for it at Way East, which is a space my boyf ran regularly from our house last year, and revived for the festival. The show was a collection of large-scale screen prints and origami by the awesome Audrey Roger - you can see the details and the full art-wank I wrote on the Way East website. Anyway, it was a great weekend, the opening was rammed and I got to meet some incredible people. My pictures don't really do the work justice - it really is amazing. But if you like what you see, there are still some hand-printed geometrics available. They're 100cm x 100cm, £200 each, and are both editions of 8 with two artist proofs. The origami is a one-off, and is £250.

Cranes for Killian

I was stumbling around on Dude Craft the other day and came across one of those rare, eye-misting causes that happen everywhere, all the time. But only pop up online like this every now and then. It was Cranes for Killian. Killian is a totally amazing teenager with cancer, who loves the 1000 cranes story (if you grew up anywhere near the Pacific Rim, you'll know it - if not, it's this). Anyway, the call went out for people to make paper cranes to send to him. So I got a posse together at work and we all learned how to make them together. Since then, the cranes have arrived and a pic of them has been added to Killian's flickr group. Which made Thalia (my friend at work) cry. Awww. If you want to make some too, you definitely should. It's easy. And nice. And the details are all here.

Art in the Attic

Last weekend, the lovely folks at ArtQuest asked me to create a stall for their annual artist jumble sale. So I set up shop offering a free valuation and restoration service to hunt out the hidden art treasures lost among the jumble. Turns out, the room was full of priceless objet d'art - all they needed was a bit of restoration. During the day, I uncovered a pencil that was actually a Jim Lambie, a few unlikely Damian Hursts and a Chapman Bros work. A humble print from a charity shop turned out to be an unsigned Chris Ofili (the dung was missing - but I restored that with some fake poo I from Preposterous Presents). I also found a rare Jeff Koons, a Yayoi Kusama, a Bruce Nauman audio recording, a raft of Christos and a long lost Banksy. After I'd restored these incredible pieces, the proud owners got a certificate of authenticity with a valuation for insurance purposes. I got to meet some lovely folks, have some fun and illicit the odd knowing guffaw. And wear a pair of cardboard comedy glasses. All of which are undoubtably good things.

Spectacular failure

We had an 11 year old down to visit over the weekend. So that meant trips to TK Maxx, expensive tickets to London's *star* attractions, teen movies and lot's of coke (a-cola). But nothing we did was as much fun for her, or us, as failing miserably at making a tyre swing out the back of our house. It was a total disaster. Getting the rope over the tree branch was a ridiculous process. Then once we'd hung the tyre, we realised it was so bald on one side that the metal reinforcing mesh was sticking out. Which punctured several fingers. Then started tearing the rope. Which, incindetally, began to stretch. The more we swung, the longer it got. So we ditched the tyre. Then tied a stick on instead. The rope got longer still. We tried another one. Even longer. Until parts of the rope were so dangerously thin we decided to get out the scissors and call it a day. It was brilliant though. The more it went wrong, the more fun it became. And all our fussing attracted neighbouring kids, who got involved too. And that earned us waves from the busloads of bemused people going past. So below is not a picture of a perfect tyre swing. But perhaps something even better.

Nokia 410093 charger?!!?!?!!?!!!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?

There's not much to say here, so I'll try to keep this short. BUT, the topic of the day is those emails taht come around about once a week at work. The ones that say 'Hi everyone!!! Sorry for the all staffer but does anyone have a [brand] [phone model] charger pse:)? xxxxx'. Whenever I read those, I can't help but put on an annoying whiney voice in my head. And neither can you. Admit it! So when a charger mysteriously landed on my desk today, I didn't look that gift horse in the mouth. No. I coiled it up, then gathered up all the agency's other stray chargers and put them in a nice box. So everyone can share (which is nice), and nobody gets charger spam anymore (which is even better).

Bearcraft Part III: Shooting!

I wasn't really sure how to label this one. I started wanting to file it under 'stuff', but the shoot turned out to be a really good laugh that brought loads of different people together. So if nothing else, it ended up feeling more like a project that made 'community' instead. So I've pushed the boat out and tagged it as both. That aside, the shoot was brilliant. I slipped into the director role, which was really fun. And despite not knowing what we were doing technically, we managed to keep the phrase 'that'll be sorted out in post' to a minimum. But after 19 hours, I think we've got everything we need. So if everything goes to plan, it should be finished and on MTV in a few weeks. Exciting!

The way to a man's heart

It was my birthday on Friday. But after the cleaning up the carnage from our last party fiasco I was up for something a bit quieter. And not at my house. So we made a little nice-food, nice-drink, nice-people bubble for ourselves in the park. I have to say, I was a fan of picnics before. But after this one, I'm a complete card-carrying evangelist. And already scheming on how to make a bigger and better one for summer. Watch this space.

Pop up pub

My friend at work Hanisha (she's brilliant) have been conspiring lately on how to make our agency a bit more lively. Or, to be more precise, a bit more drunk. So we've been campaigning to create 'The Pad and Marker' - the work pop-up pub. Fingers crossed it becomes a reality. But in the mean time, here's the presentation I put together so we could prise some cash out of the powers that be.

Intro.

The current situation.

What would help. Basically, booze.

What we'd really like to do: Pop up pub!

Wig PAAAAAAAAtay

I love Paks. It's amazing. But I do find a whole shop full of things I have no idea how to use a bit intimidating. So to legitimise a shopping trip there we had a wig party. I manned the custom built salon as W'Yves St Laurent and transformed our guests into their wig uber-selves. Plus, thanks to my new friends at Paks (and Wig World in Finsbury Park - they're so fantastic) I learned how to do weaves for real. Plus if you hang out there long enough, you can catch the guys who run the shop fool around with the wigs. Believe me, seeing an old, bald Pakistani man in a blond bob is every bit as funny as it sounds. Anyway, it turned out to be one of those amazing nights where loads of people met loads of people, the dancing got mental and a good time was had by all. Here's the invite - which is actually be best photoshop work I've done in my life. (The link worked in the email - it went to here).



And selection of W'Yves' creations.


Plus other general wig shenanigans.