Yesterday evening we met our friend Paul McAllister at Origin. It is London Design Week, and many shows that I’ve seen this week were highlighting craft, which is refreshing since usually craft and design are seen as separate entities.
Here are a few of my favorites from the show:
Momoko Kumai
The statues placed all around town in surprising places is charming & fantastical…it reminds me a bit of Hayao Miyazaki’s films.
Cosmic Factory was a dinnerware factory in Jingdezhen that closed. Now it is a shell of a complex with plates as far as the eye can see.
Jingdezhen China is a village of one million people that produces almost all of China’s ceramics. It is an interesting place where production is still manual in alleyways accessed by dirt roads.
The terracotta warriors. This masterpiece of historical China was awe-inspiring and overwhelming…and keep in mind these were only discovered in the 1970’s when some farmers were digging for a well! Amazing.
The terracotta figures are life-sized. They vary in height, uniform, and hairstyle in accordance with rank. Most originally held real weapons such as spears, swords, or crossbows. Originally, the figures were also painted with bright pigments, variously coloured pink, red, green, blue, black, brown, white and lilac…to be honest, I prefer them faded.
Jetsteph 