WHALE TANKERS. TANKER ART.

Naum Gabo 'Circular Relief', 1925. Nina Williams. www.tate.org.uk/Stives.
A work of art.

Gabo and Pevsner ....'space and time are fundamental to life. Art aimed at being one with the esssence of the real must accept this basic premise'......'in London (approx. 1938-40) he was introduced to persex, a new plastic from ICI, and used this material in some of his best known works. He used transparent plastic tubing or plasic sheet made into warped, parabolicx planes, shot through with parallel nylon threading.

www.bookrags.com/biography/naum-gabo

'But what are concepts save formulations and creations of thought, which, instead of giving us the true forms of objects, show us rather the forms of thought itself.? Consequently all schemata which science evolves in order to classify, organise and summarise the phenomena of the real world turn out to be nothing but arbitrary schemes - airy fabrics of the mind, which express not the nature of things, but the nature of mind'.

Ernst Cassirer.

Is this a sculpture or a pile of tanker rears? I love it and think it is worthy of a place in any gallery.

This is beautiful! Inside a tanker waiting for repair or renovation.

TANKER ART?

One of the things that struck me whilst photographing tankers and tanker components at Whale was how sculptural some of the parts are. They are parts of road tankers and yet are or could they not be works of art in a gallery? The quality finish insisted upon by the tanker companies could be the finish desired for an art piece. The question is, what is art?

According to the Collins English Dictionary, a summary of the meaning of ART is:-

'Creation of works of beauty or other special significance'. or

'Imaginative skill as applied to representations of the natural world or figments of the imagination'. or

'The exercise of human skill'.

Everything you look at has been designed by someone. Beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder.

Some of the rear pieces of the tankers are so amazing to me.

This could surely be a sculpture?
It has been created with a use, a purpose. It will grow up to be a tanker.

A work of art - or a tanker body waiting to be made into a tanker.A beautiful scarlet Hazco tanker destined for a life removing hazardous waste?

An Anish Kapoor Sculpture courtesy of 'Imagine', BBC1.

A stainless steel rear dish of a tanker.

Anish Kapoor sculpture. 'Cloud Gate', Millennium Park, Chicago. (The Bean). Picture courtesy of 'Imagine' BBC1. His pieces are highly prized and a considerable amount of time is spent on the perfection of the finish. This is a reflective walk through piece. The estimate was 3M, budget 9M and it cost 23M.

The steel baffle that fits inside a tank - or is it a work of art? CMG

The store of rusting rings, supports for the tanker body.

Is the stamp 'work of art' governed by the 'Way of Seeing' or is it of 'Intent'.
A defence in burglary is in whether the defendent has 'the intention to permanently deprive the victim thereof' or in murder 'the intention to take the life of another'. so is a work of art intended to be a work of art and thus is?

'Creation is only the projection into form of that which already exists'

Shrimad Bhagavatum

WHALE TANKERS The Paint Shop

PAINTED LADIES.

From the plain metal, shiny tanker shapes in colour emerge.

Firstly, any scratches or blemishes are filled and rubbed down and the tankers are rough blasted.

A beautiful high gloss finish.

In a large paint booth, the tanker body is sprayed. The finish of the tanker is prefect. Anish Kapoor insists his sculptures have a perfect finish and this prefection is part of his art. I see a tanker as a work of art.

Anish Kapoor 'Yellow Hollow' 1999 Courtesy of 'Imagine' BBC1, 2009. A work of art.

WHALE TANKERS The Birth of a Tanker

THE BIRTH OF A TANKER

I had been looking forward to my visit to Whale Tankers for some time. The tankers are festooned with pipes, are colourful and to me, works of art and design.

I had to see where a tanker is born, and where do they go to die? Like most vehicles, they usually become part of the enormous scrap metal pool in the sky. I wondered where they have their tyres changed and was amazed to discover that they go to ATS and other such tyre companies as cars do.

The Whale Tanker site in Solihull is landscaped with a large lake, home to many birds including geese. I was made very welcome and Dean was allocated to show me around. Alas, being overwhelmed by the visual imagery, I have not remembered all of the processes.

The tank is mounted on a Chassis that is either free issued by the customer to Whale, or bought by them, but in the case of a trailer, it is mounted on to a bogey or running gear manufactured by Whale.

TThe bespoke castings are designed by Whale and then bought in.


Flat sheets of Stainless Steel are laid onto this machine, rolled and the joins automatically welded, creating a round tanker shape.

Forming the beginnings of a tanker; the creation of a work of art. You can see where the sheets are welded together, and in the top, shapes which look as if they may be inspection chambers.


And here they are, in the skip, similar shapes. A sculptor would be delighted at all of these! (Or is it just me???)


A tanker showing the strengthening rings.

Tanker before painting.

For me, the shapes, marks and geometry are so exciting.

ANISH KAPOOR

Imagine, BBC 1 Anish Kapoor

Is it that I am a Textile Designer that I did not know about the work of Anish Kapoor. I have been overwhelmed by his work and his words.

“You can’t set out to make something beautiful – I mean, you can’t. What you can do is to recognize moments when it’s there and say ah – that is something I could go after or I could leave it alone”.

As the first artist to be given the whole Royal Academy, his exhibition is of great magnitude.

“The hard bit is how not to compromise”, he said.

In May 2009, on the South Downs, Brighton, he created the amazing ‘C Curve’, which looks like stainless steel or aluminium which mirrors and reflects landscape and people. Upside down on one side – ‘like a spoon’.

“I am very concerned with the ability of art to say, ‘come on in’, experiential. Not just something you look at but a process you go through. One level – engage – another level, seriousness”. He is very interested in the perfect finish of his pieces.

“Work resonates, that simple but poetic quality – that’s what I am looking for”.

‘Living Sky Mirror’ a polished disk which reflects the moving sky. (£1.3 million pounds)

“You can look at it for hours and never see the same thing”. “Extraterrestrial quality, Beguiling – mercurial – puzzling”.

2002 Tate Modern “Marcius” huge red trumpet, staggering complexity and scale. 1.8 million people visited.
A Dutch shipbuilder made ‘Hive’ a huge iron piece formed out of curved plates. Couldn’t make up his mind whether to leave it black or rust it. It was rusted, a beautiful red.

As an Iraqi Jew, he worked in a Kibbutz after going to India’s Eton. Eventually, he was accepted at Hornsey School of Art. ‘Artist’ felt overly serious'. he said.

Affected by Indian culture, watching block printers and fabric dyers, he came back to England to working with pigments, sculptures in brilliant colours in powder form. He felt this was the first time his pieces had a voice. He didn’t have to sell them. A source of wonder. “Pigment and shape are one, sensual”.

“Body” a huge warehouse of scarlet parts which people could walk through and experience.

I so empathise with his comments on the colour red (which he uses a lot). “Red makes a kind of black, a kind of black that blue doesn’t. It’s a black you see when you close your eye. It’s something you know intimately and it’s that ‘knowing’ that is the real subject of the work”.

Ralph Rugoff-Director of the Hayward Gallery said “A lot of his work is like a void – a space without boundary – it never feels like empty space. It always feels weighted and with some life. A lot of the work happens in relation to your response to it”

Homi Bhabha, Harvard University said. “One is always on the brink of being both inside the work and outside the work. You are literally placed in relation to the void on an edge between what you know and what you don’t know. He engages not only the eye, but the nerves and the emotions. It is as if it is four dimensions instead of 3”.

The logistics of transporting and creating 'Scarlet Funnel' on hillside overlooking the sea in New Zealand, so majestic, is almost impossible. "Vagnarian leaning towards the grand"

‘Yellow Hollow’ - ‘Yellow, 1999. B

brilliant canary yellow and so perfect.

“I think one has to have the courage to sit in an empty studio and wait for something to happen. And work, and play, and experiment and try some daft idea out”.

HIS ANALYSIS. “It helped me to understand an inner life properly - seriously, and saying, ‘It is the thing from which all emerges’. Without it there is nothing but at the same time, it’s not on display.

'Cloud Gate', Millennium Park, Chicago. The Bean. Estimate 3m. Budget 9m. Cost 23m! Amazing huge bean, alloy? Mirrored skyline etc. Smooth and uncomplex on the outside, womblike inside. Stunning.

“It seems to me there is no other reason to be an artist. If I know what I know and you know what you know and I tell you what I know, who cares. My instinct is that making work is about daring to go to something I don’t know and hoping that in going where I don’t know, you, the viewer can go where you don’t know too”.

‘Psycho Drama’ A piece at the Royal Academy, showing a cannon shooting scarlet wax through an archway onto a wall. “Blatently Sexual”, he said.

“I don’t particularly have anything to say as an artist. I don’t have some grand message that I want to give you. To me the work is neither abstract, nor is it not abstract. It sits in between meaning and no meaning. Apparently, it’s just a form and then perhaps It’s not a form. It looks like, feels like something I know. The route to meaning may not be direct”.

‘Wax Train’ ‘Spiam’. (Self generating train).

‘Slug’ 2009. Red ‘vagina’ and white ‘worm’ (sperm?)

“Just as you can’t make something beautiful, or set out to, you also can’t set out to make something spiritual. What you can do is to recognize it may be there. It normally has to do with not having too much to say. There seems to be space for the viewer. And that’s something we sometimes identify as being spiritual, and its all about space".

And why does the work of Anish Kapoor affect me so much?

I started the Masters Degree so that I may 'step out of my box', the box which stamps me as a surface designer and he has moved me into the possibility of 3-dimensional imagery, a sort of 'Zen' of sculpture, of pure geometry.

Digital Textile Design: Director(s) of the Fashion School

Digital Textile Design: Director(s) of the Fashion School J.R. Campbell.

Simon told me about this guy, J.R. Campbell, Glasgow and his pictorial digitally printed pieces. I have always loved the way that Zandra Rhodes printed her designs in the shape of the garment. Here, J.R. Campbell is doing something similar but in an up to date, even forward looking way. His pieces can be seen as art, which hangs on the wall or is worn as a Kimono, jacket etc.

Collars, pipes and tankers

Thinking about the tanker as a container, wrapped in pipes of all sorts of different sizes, colours and purposes, I began to create three dimensional structures, chrysalises, samples for lighting perhaps.

Firstly, I sampled extensively with many fabrics, analysing their stretching abilities and whether they gave me the quality I was looking for. The effects were varied. Some fabrics were just too heavy, others had insufficient stretch. Eventually, after considerable research, I found a stretch silk satin, a silk and lycra mix. Creating a striking line design from the back of a tanker, I printed sample pieces of the silk satin, exploring what I could create. I also sampled to see if the silk lycra would print and dye with Procions. It dyed and printed perfectly. I then sampled to see if the colours I was using would discharge and was pleased with the results.

I much preferred the matt reverse side of the fabric and loved the heaviness and drape.

One piece of heavy strimming wire has been threaded through this piece, tensioning it into pockets at each end.

This design has two pieces of strimming wire tensioned into the piece.

Samples in deep plum. One and two pipes have been threaded in different positions.

Several pipes are used to create the rust sample. I can see this on a much larger scale and one of my challenges is to create a huge structure. Finding the 'pipes' with the right firmness and stiffness to enable them to be tensioned is one of my problems. Recently I have discovered a linen with lycra, a stretch linen. It is gorgeous and I can't wait to sample with that. I am thinking of structures which could survive outside, or tougher structures which could be waterproofed, perhaps.

COLLARS OR LIGHTS ETC.

Using the shape of the backs of tankers, I then created two ideas for collars, or lighting with the intention of laser cutting them later in fabric. I printed the shaped in various sizes, cut them out and collated them into shapes. So many wonderful ideas here.

This shape is created using a design taken from the rear of a tanker.


I can see so much potential in this black and white shape. So dynamic, but then I adore pure colour, black and white.

A design for a neck piece, light or larger structure taken from the rear of the 'CB' tanker.

I now must source fabric with which to make the piece.

All images are copyright. Thank you.

A day in London

My day in London was peculiar from the beginning.

I peaked into the ticket office at the underground. No one there. As I delved into my bag for money, suddenly he appeared as if from nowhere and I jumped.

'I thought I was in Harry Potter', I laughed.

'I'm not that ugly', he said.

'Did you use flue powder?', I asked, and we laughed. He was so helpful and as I left, he asked seriously,

'Are you an actress?'

'Many say I am a drama queen, but no'

Hysterical! It cheered me up.

I set off for The Hayward Gallery.

As I waited for my train, I took these pictures at Euston underground

I was wandering along the South Bank towards the gallery when a woman accosted me, squinting at me sideways and pointing a finger, she said.

'You're a film star, aren't you?'

I insisted I wasn't but she wasn't convinced, pointing and looking at me knowingly.

I then bumped into a friend from Dolton, the village where I live. I told her my weird happenings and she said she wasn't surprised. She said I really stood out and looked special. And there I was in my usual scruff gear. Perhaps it was because I was at a Healing Weekend and had been soaking up the energies? Who knows!!

I had been drawn to 'Walking in My Mind', a huge exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, after a friend told me about it. I had been delving into the deepest recesses of my consciousness in my studies of 'Zen' and was confused about conceptual art. No photography was allowed, except outside, which was a shame.

There are just too many exhibits to discuss but

Thomas Hirschhorn's endless series of cardboard caves covered in brown parcel tape was an uncomfortable, almost fairground experience with uneven soft, disorientating floors, figures covered in silver foil with extended 'umbilical chords', an inner environment of about ten caves.

'To me, the cave is in your brain, the cave is in your mind...You have to build this cave in your mind and to struggle with what happens in this cave, in confronting it with the world'.

It was the work and mind of Yayoi Kusama which most captivated me though.

Here I am in Yayoi's room of scarlet balloons and white polka dots, a stolen photo before I was pounced upon by security.

'My artwork is an expression of my life, particularly of my mental disease. My art originates from hallucinations only I can see. I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings'.

Eventually, after showing her art in America, in 1973 she returned to Japan where she chose to settle permanently in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo.

Kusama started painting polka dots when she was about ten years old. This motif, which has remained a central feature of her work, emerged as the result of recurring hallucinations in which the artist found herself and all her surroundings covered in the same pattern. She has said that the experience made her feel as if she was revolving 'in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space' and sees her life as a 'dot lost among a million other dots'.

There was something more than disturbing about the work. Something questioning. To be so immersed in her psyche, her life of polka dots, was uncomfortable, but powerful too.

Chiharu Shiota's gallery was an oppressive spiders web, a huge cat's cradle, someone else's walk through nightmare.

'''when I dream...I feel the dream as reality. I can't distinguish between dream and reality. When I wake up, I have the feeling I'm still dreaming'.

There were many others, and I left the exhibition almost questioning my own sanity. 'what is normal? What is acceptable? I left with the understanding that in art, one may delve as deeply into the subconscious as one wishes or needs.

NEW DESIGNERS

In the afternoon, my main reason for my visit to London was to explore New Designers.

I love 'New Designers' because it is such good research of what is being created in Art Colleges. I was obviously interested in seeing the work on the Falmouth University College stand, which I felt compared very favourably with other colleges. I love to look at Farnham because that is where I did my B.A. and Bath, where I studied for one year. I took two photos only, I think of Bucks University.

But what I took from the day, after enjoying exploring the stands, wondering at the diversity of the work; the excitement and anticipation of the students and opportunities which had already presented themselves, was that almost everything has been done before in some form or another.

We, as designers, should never be restricted by that familiarity, or that our idea 'has been done before'. Our interpretation may develop into something unique and exciting, innovative and unusual. We must always 'follow our noses' to see where it leads us.

'

Cows

Plans are made, so much to do to create my hangings - and then - I injure my back, hurt whilst camping in Milan and not dealt with. Agony. I have not been able to do any work this week.

I am doing what I can.

One morning, unable to sleep, I finally gave in at about 5.30 am. and I set off with my camera. The sun was rising. It was beautiful.I was enjoying my morning with a herd of heifers, remembering my cows, Melody, a contrary Jersey cow, a person whom we loved dearly. Salefka, another temperamental Jersey was used to being milked from both sides and she kicked. I bought a calf, barely a week old, a Hereford Friesian, Edwina, whom I fed with an enormous bottle.

I hung over a 5-bar gate, awed at the beauty of the glistening morning, my expert moooos drawing a small herd of young heifers.

I was caught up with the sun shining on their drool, their feathery whiskers, laughing at their curiosity and personalities.

An ear - backlit by the morning sun.

'Is it edible?' Cows explore with their tongues.

The detail of the inside 0f a cows mouth is incredible in this one.

Golden and scarlet whiskers.

A nostril. Quite a Zen shape which is what I love. A cow is exploring my face and I manage to capture this wonderful image of her nostril, a swirling echo of other imagery of pipes in fabric and spontaneous drawing in meditation.

This, to me is the wonder and beauty of design.

Drool, like dew in the early morning.

We have created many vegetarians in our time with the animals. It is true. Many children think meat is something bought in a supermarket, 'food on a nappy', as Mel says - could be made from anything. Children are horrified that they eat these beautiful animals, as sentient as cats and dogs. I love livestock but one cannot avoid the killing. I had to give it up.

My point is that all events in our lives make us the people we are. The animals are part of my design process, my design thinking, my own sentience, part of my Soul.

Images are copyright.