From the Archive; Malcolm Garrett interview

Screen Shot from Malcolm Garrett's website, showing Buzzcocks graphics, photographed by Nick Harling

Screen Shot from Malcolm Garrett’s website, showing Buzzcocks graphics, photographed by Nick Harling

I love collections, and exhibitions of collections, especially when they inspire designers and their work, so I would very much like to make the journey to Manchester (which I wrote about, here) to see Collecting Malcolm Garrett, part of the design festival, Design Manchester 17. In celebration of Malcolm Garrett and his work in the music industry (which he spoke about at Pick Me Up, reviewed here), I’m posting another previously unpublished interview from the British Council exhibition, Sound Design. Malcolm mentions his old school friends, Peter Saville (read that interview here) and Keith Breeden, who I also interviewed, so watch out for that interview too.

Malcolm Garrett, interviewed by Liz Farrelly on 12/7/2000.

Liz Farrelly: Where did it all start?

Malcolm Garrett: The Buzzocks was 23 years ago. It came about because I wanted to do a sleeve that wasn’t just a piece of cardboard and I was always interested in corporate graphics, as opposed to corporations, and subverting corporate graphics and systems graphics too, because a record sleeve is fundamentally information. So I was looking at it from an informational standpoint, as opposed to an art gallery standpoint. We were selling something so much more ethereal than say, banking services, so there was a frisson there. And because, with the Buzzcocks, some of their songs were looking at the nature of society and relationships in quite a detached way, it seemed appropriate to misappropriate some form of informational graphics.
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Lecture; Temporary Contemporary, the Boilerhouse at the V&A

As a tie-in with Bloomsbury Academic, publishers of Design Objects and the Museum (see, here), Joanna Weddell and myself were invited to give a Lunchtime Lecture at the Victoria and Albert Museum. As we shared the time-slot our talks were short and aimed at a general audience, but both are based on doctoral research, and the blurb draws connections between our projects, so I’ve included it in full before posting an edited version of my talk with the slides, which provided an additional strand of information supplementing the visuals.

Contemporary Design Objects in the Museum: Two Perspectives
The Lydia and Manfred Gorvy Lecture Theatre
Victoria and Albert Museum
Cromwell Road, London SW7
26 April 2017

‘This lecture will examine the exhibition of 20th century design. Circulation, or ‘Circ’ was responsible for many of the Museum’s acquisitions of post-war contemporary design. Joanna Weddell will discuss Circ’s role as a ‘museum within a museum’ through shows such as Design Review, 1975. The Boilerhouse Gallery was a temporary intervention at the Museum funded and run by the Conran Foundation, as Liz Farrelly will explain. Betweeen 1981 and 1986 the Gallery increased the visibility of contemporary design through thematic exhibitions that booted visitor figures and grabbed headlines, later morphing into the Design Museum at Shad Thames.’ Lunchtime Lectures Summer 2017, V&A.

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First Visit; Tallinn, Estonian

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This gallery contains 22 photos.

This gallery illustrates my whistle-stop trip to Tallinn, Estonia. I was invited to deliver a paper at a seminar, part of the 7th Tallinn Applied Art Triennial, for an edited version of that paper, see here. This post is about … Continue reading

Seminar Paper; Mediating Design, a case study in diversity

Modes of Mediating Applied Art and Design
7th Tallinn Applied Art Triennial
Soprus Cinema
Vanna-Posti 8, Tallinn, Estonia
21 April 2017

This is an edited version of a paper I presented amidst Art Deco splendor in Tallinn. While the city was still waiting for spring the reception was warm, and the audience and fellow speakers contributed to a lively discussion around the role of media in the mediating art and design. I’d like to thank Triin Jerlie and Keiu Krikmann for inviting me to speak, and the organising committee of the Tallinn Applied Art Triennial and the British Embassy Tallinn for funding my trip. Look for another post about Tallinn, the city-wide Triennial and the Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design.

This paper is still in the form of a ‘talk’, but also constitutes work-in-progress that will inform the last chapter of my doctoral thesis on the future of design museums. In May, I presented a longer version to University of Brighton MA Art and Design History students as part of the module, Critical Reflection, at the invitation of my colleague, Megha Rajguru, and that version of the talk provided an opportunity to explore changing definitions of ‘interpretation’. The images are from my PowerPoint presentation, and either taken from the Internet or using my Apple iPhone 4S.
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From the Archive; You never know when you might need them

Spread from ‘Blueprint’ showing University of Brighton Gallery and exhibition design featuring salvaged fire doors

Spread from ‘Blueprint’ showing the University Gallery in Brighton and the exhibition design featuring salvaged fire doors

I was reminded of this article when visiting another exhibition, George Hardie …Fifty Odd Years, also at the University Gallery at University of Brighton. (Look out for a review of that exhibition, soon).

Back in 2005, Professor Hardie contributed his collection of rulers to You never know when you might need them, and they feature in the opening spread of the Blueprint article about the show, see above. At the time, my husband, Gregg Virostek, was an Interior Architecture student and worked on the exhibition build, while I was beginning to explore an obsession with collecting. That interest has developed into a research topic, as evidenced by this blog. So, as this article has yet to be digitised and made available online by the originally publisher it, here it is for reference.
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First Visit; Vitra Schaudepot

Exterior of the Vitra Schaudepot, by Herzog & de Meuron. Photo © Vitra Design Museum, Julien Lanoo

Exterior of the Vitra Schaudepot, by Herzog & de Meuron. Photo © Vitra Design Museum, Julien Lanoo

Vitra Schaudepot
Vitra Design Museum
Charles-Eames-Str. 2, Weil am Rhein, Germany
Visited, 31 May 2016

I used to go on press trips so regularly that I thought I didn’t need holidays. Travelling on planes and trains across Europe, America and further afield I visited designers, studios, factories and museums. Having swopped my peripatetic lifestyle for a more sedentary teaching gig, this press trip came out of the blue. I previously visited Vitra for a MUSCON conference (read about it, here) and marvelled at the Vitra Haus (read, here), so was aware of the upcoming addition to the extraordinary campus and keen to see the Schaudepot (Open Storage), a relatively new development in museum practice. A return visit wasn’t on my agenda though, so when this invitation popped into my inbox along with a commission to review the Vitra Collection’s new home, I was up for it! My article appeared in Blueprint magazine (no.347, p.36) and is available online at Design/Curial, here. This post adds details from the press conference and a conversation with Curator Janna Lipsky.
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From the Archive; remembering Lucienne Day

Lucienne Day in New York with Calyx (1951), 1952: The Robin and Lucienne Day Foundation and archive. Photographer: Studio Briggs.

Lucienne Day in New York with Calyx (1951), 1952: The Robin and Lucienne Day Foundation and archive. Photographer: Studio Briggs.

The current issue of Blueprint celebrates the life and work of Lucienne Day in the centenary year of her birth, with articles by and about her. The back pages of the magazine collect previous articles about the renowned designer, including a review I wrote about an exhibition at Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery, long before the stunning renovation and addition (mentioned in a previous post about Manchester, here); when I visited the Gallery presented a perfect example of late Victorian institutional architecture, a fine addition to the “Red Brick” University of Manchester. Initially, the thought of re-reading an article written over 24 years ago was a bit daunting, but then it helped me recall my first time in Manchester, an extraordinary day trip, meeting Lucienne Day and Jennifer Harris (the curator and author of the exhibition catalogue), and the privilege of walking the exhibition in their company. A new exhibition at the Gallery, Lucienne Day – A sense of growth, from 14 April to 11 June 2017, examines how plant forms inspired many of Lucienne Day’s iconic patterns. I hope to get back up north to visit it…

Lucienne Day celebrated in Blueprint, no. 351.

Lucienne Day celebrated in Blueprint, no. 351.

“British design’s first celebrity”
by Liz Farrelly
Blueprint, June 1993, pp.36-38
Exhibition review of Lucienne Day: a career in design
Whitworth Art Gallery, Oxford Road, Manchester
23 April to 26 June 1993
Visited 22 April 1993

Calyx screen-printed furnishing fabric, Lucienne Day, Heal’s Wholesale &; Export, 1951. The Robin and Lucienne Day Foundation and archive.

Calyx screen-printed furnishing fabric, Lucienne Day, Heal’s Wholesale & Export, 1951: The Robin and Lucienne Day Foundation and archive.

After a long and distinguished carer, Lucienne Day is being honoured with a retrospective exhibition which, appropriately enough for a textile designer, is in Manchester. Over 80 per cent of her furnishing fabrics are here, supplemented by examples of designs for wallpaper and tableware, showing a great virtuosity of image-making and variety of aesthetics. And while the exhibition sheds light on an individual’s career, it acts just as effectively as a review of changing styles in domestic taste, albeit at the upper end of the market.
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First Visit; IKEA Museum

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This gallery contains 36 photos.

IKEA Museum IKEAgatan, 5, 343.36 Älmhult, Sweden ikeamuseum.com Visited, 9 June 2016 Invited to the Press Preview of the new IKEA Museum, I travelled to the company town of Älmhult in southern Sweden. Later I wrote an article about the … Continue reading

Guest blogger; Circ in the Museum

From the V&A’s Search the Collections website, using the keyword ‘Circ’. Cabinet, made in 1861 by Richard Norman Shaw. CIRC.96.1 to 12-1963. (Accessioned by the Circulation Department in 1963). ©Victoria and Albert Museum, London

From the V&A’s Search the Collections website, using the keyword ‘Circ’. Cabinet, made in 1861 by Richard Norman Shaw. CIRC.96.1 to 12-1963. (Accessioned by the Circulation Department in 1963). ©Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Originally published on Bloomsbury Visual Arts Blog in July 2016, Joanna Weddell reflects on comments made by the Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Martin Roth, on the occasion of the museum winning the Art Fund’s Museum of the Year 2016 award. Joanna co-edited Design Objects and the Museum with me, which is published by Bloomsbury Academic, and available here.

‘The V&A Circulation Department and Museum of the Year 2016’
by Joanna Weddell
Bloomsbury Visual Arts Blog

On 6 July 2016 Martin Roth, Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), London, announced a plan ‘to revive the Museum’s legendary Circulation Department’. As a member of the Museum’s Research Department, I was delighted to hear a clear reference to the subject of my chapter in Design Objects and the Museum, co-edited with Liz Farrelly (Bloomsbury Academic, January 2016).
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Shopping Paradise; objects on display

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This gallery contains 33 photos.

Outside looking in, the glazed facade of Brighton’s premier flea market, Snoopers Paradise (“Snoopers”), projects domestic objects right into the street. Close-up window-shopping is only possible out of hours when external stalls have been packed away, but it draws people … Continue reading