We made it
Marianka Swain
Aged 64, Roger Hooper is still braving the Antarctic and plunging into the Amazon rainforests in search of that perfect photograph. Based in London when he’s not traversing the globe, he regularly exhibits work, has produced three books, and contributes images to the WWF’s publications – his way of encouraging others to take an interest in and protect our natural world.MARIANKA SWAIN: When did your passion for wildlife photography begin?ROGER HOOPER: It started when I was a teenager. I began photographing family and friends’ children, and then turning my parents’ kitchen into a darkroom to Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
It may seem like a long way from Shakespeare to Siegfried and Roy, but John Napier has had a remarkable career in which high and low art come together and share the applause. So not only has the theatre designer staged a magic show in Vegas, he’s worked a more subtle magic in his time at the RSC. And in a world where musicals run for decades, Napier’s stage sets have been among the most consistent and celebrated factors in the success of many of our best-loved West End shows.So if you’ve ever seen Cats or Starlight Express, Les Misérables or Miss Saigon – or caught Nicholas Nickleby in Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
How much would a Stradivarius or a Guarneri violin set you back? Hundreds of thousands of pounds? These days it’s more like millions – many millions. With the value of the finite collection of 17th- and 18th-century instruments only rising every year, and their appeal as investments increasing proportionally, it’s a rare musician indeed who can afford to play a historical violin of this quality.But what looks at first glance like a crisis is actually the catalyst for an unprecedented boom in instrument-making. No longer playing second fiddle to their elder counterparts, contemporary violins, Read more ...
bella.todd
Janet Echelman’s aerial net sculptures are all about intersections and interdependencies: between ancient and modern technologies, between mankind and our environment, and between each painstakingly knotted thread. They also unite the worlds of art and craft. Echelman is a sculptor and artist whose work has incorporated everything from Balian Batik dyeing to Lithuanian lacemaking. Now she uses net, creating vast, floating installations inspired by natural phenomena.With a brand new work premiering at the first Lumiere London festival, and before that another on show at Lumiere Durham in Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Starting out as a publisher of laser discs in 1984, Manhattan's Criterion Collection has become America’s most famous independent publisher of DVDs and Blu-ray discs. A key factor in its success is the graphic range of the discs’ exquisitely designed covers.Each is conceived and rendered to capture the essence of a film or to propose a critical re-evaluation through the tweaking or embellishing of a well-known image, as in the cases of Belle du Jour, The Night Porter and A Man Escaped. Classic images from A Canterbury Tale and Eraserhead were painted to cast the films in a subtle new Read more ...
Thomas Rees
James Montgomery is a difficult man to pin down. When I first call to arrange an interview he’s too busy to talk. I call back only to find he’s in the middle of fixing a broken bailing machine, and when the interview finally takes place it’s to a backdrop of exasperated lowing: “I’ve moved six calves in the time I’ve been talking to you,” he says.Running Manor Farm, near North Cadbury in Somerset, sounds like a full time job in itself, yet somehow Montgomery manages it and still finds time to produce two of Britain’s finest cheeses. The farm has been making Ogleshield, a washed-rind cheese Read more ...
Marianka Swain
If your most successful creative collaboration as a couple is that tilting IKEA bookcase, prepare to be shamed: Stephen Gillies and Kate Jones have spent the past 20 years crafting exceptional blown-glass pieces together. The pair studied at Stourbridge College of Art – Stephen glassmaking and Kate fine art – and their work is a result of those complementary skills. You can see some of it next week at the Royal Botanic Gardens’ celebration of craft, Handmade at Kew.Can you explain the traditional methods you use?We make glass without moulds, so we free blow the material. It makes the process Read more ...
Thomas Rees
Spurred on by Olympic glory and British wins in the Tour de France, the popularity of cycling has grown exponentially over the past few years. It’s boom time for retailers of factory-made bicycles, like Halfords, who sold 1.3 million bikes last year, but that’s only half the story. In the past decade, the UK has also become a world leader in hand-built bicycles, made to order for discerning clients around the globe. theartsdesk paid a visit to former sculptor Jake Rusby, one of the most highly regarded of these new British frame-builders, to talk about painstaking paint jobs, perfectionism Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Back in the 1980s, parents and teachers alike worried that a generation of kids would drift away from reading and be seduced by the immersive delights of computer gaming. What many kids knew, however, was that you didn’t have to choose between books and games at all. A peculiar hybrid of the two - the gamebook - became a minor publishing phenomenon. Of all the competing choose-your-own-adventure titles that flooded the mid-Eighties market, few captured the imagination like the original Fighting Fantasy series by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone.A quick primer if you somehow missed the Read more ...
Helen K Parker
An air of busy calm greets me as I walk onto the top floor of Bristol’s Cameron Balloon factory. Considering this company is the largest manufacturer of hot air balloons in the world, my novice expectations of behemoth machinery raging back and forth in huge production lines are somewhat undone by the sight of six women sitting at industrial sewing machines, dotted around the farthest edges of the vast room, quietly stitching. No cacophony of machinery, just the steady thrumming of needle through fabric, bobbins spinning, the occasional tut as unwieldy material is hefted further in from the Read more ...
bella.todd
What do you get when you cross classical ballet with computer coding? Wearable-tech en pointe shoes that light up as the ballerinas dance. One of the highlights of September’s Brighton Digital Festival, [data]Storm is the brainchild of ballet dancer turned IT teacher Genevieve Smith-Nunes. She set up readysaltedcode, the recipient of a Google RISE Award, to bring the worlds of arts and computer science closer together – and rubbish a few gender stereotypes into the bargain. Making the shoes for the performance, she tells theartsdesk, involved sewing, coding and a whole Read more ...
Guy Oddy
This year Birmingham Royal Ballet celebrates 25 years in the city, during which time the company has presented more than 130 different ballets. Over the years, Birmingham Royal Ballet has worked with some of the biggest names in theatrical design, art and fashion, including Jasper Conran OBE, John Macfarlane, Philip Prowse and Katrina Lindsay. To mark their silver jubilee, the company has teamed up with House of Fraser’s Birmingham store to display a few highlights from their extensive catalogue of costumes. The Arts Desk asked Birmingham Royal Ballet’s Costume Assistant, Anna Willetts about Read more ...