Experiments in miniature - early 2016

Kim L Pace: Clay maquette

Kim L Pace: Trying out glaze effects

Kim L Pace: Various poses

The Bees - Laline Paull

'The Bees' invites you into the world of the honey bee from the perspective of a worker bee called Flora 717.
 
In reality and in the book, if you're a worker, you cannot get ahead by pursuing your own reproduction, so you might as well help the queen with her reproduction.
"In a beehive, the workers are happy to help the community, even to die, because the queen carries and passes on their genes."

However, Flora 717 is a rather different bee than her 'sanitation worker' status would imply.

A beautiful book, informative and imaginative, simultaneously... A tale of mother courage, conflict and dystopia among social insects. It is packed with metaphor and an underlying call to recognise the damage to and depletion of our bee populations.

"Facebook is Shit"

"Facebook is Shit" - Gunter Grass, Nobel Prize Winner*

The YoungMinds campaigns director, Lucie Russell, said: "Every day we hear about the unprecedented toxic climate children and young people face in a 24/7 online culture where they can never switch off."

Teens are so emotionally invested in social media that a fifth will wake up at night and log on. 

"Mental health is the biggest unaddressed health challenge of our age, and young people's mental health must be a top priority for Britain."

Girls are likely to experience stress more frequently than boys, and more often than the average adult, with girls feeling stressed an average of twice a week.

June Eric Udorie writes in the Guardian:
"It’s becoming more and more obvious how the pressures of social media disproportionately affect teenage girls. I can see it all around me. Pressure to be perfect. To look perfect, act perfect, have the perfect body, have the perfect group of friends, the perfect amount of likes on Instagram. Perfect, perfect, perfect. And if you don’t meet these ridiculously high standards, then the self-loathing and bullying begins.
What is really worrying is that time and time again, these studies pop up and demonstrate that the mental health of teenagers, especially teenage girls, is on the line. We know this. We need the State to act".

*http://channel.louisiana.dk/video/g%C3%BCnter-grass-facebook-shit

Fine Art research and the tyranny of the scientific model

Fine art is – of course - an activity that is the subject of academic research.

However, it strikes me the idea that science methodology as the only acceptable form of inquiry misses the point.  Perhaps it’s a lack of confidence in qualitative research that undermines art research? 

Prior to the eighteenth century, ‘art’ and ‘science’ were often considered complimentary, rather than opposite, expressions of human culture. They often shared concerns through comparable curiosity, knowledge and observation of the world.

Outside the physical sciences, many subjects now seem to have a hard time establishing themselves as viable for research in their own terms. So what's going on?

Natural science depicted

Alessi Apostrophe Orange Peeler

You might require an orange peeler to help create the designs - Alessi do a super little ergonomic one

The Art of Ornamental Orange Peeling

"It is surprising what can be done with the conventional orange"