I went up to London yesterday to meet up with a few uni friends and ended up staying over in the 1940s garage that where friend Lizzie lives. Taking a bit of a detour, I managed to march up Oxford Street to view Kyle’s Selfridges exhibit in person, and marvel at the constant stream of people taking photographs of our castle.

I went looking for some sandals in Camden that might stand up to a week walking around Berlin (upcoming holiday) but not ordinary sandal ones that are sometimes uncomfortable, or those walking sandals that are just never a good look. I found these, and I do like them, but I’m struggling to come up with what to wear them with….

A current task I’m working on at the library is a set of six or seven posters to illustrate positive rules for the children’s library. Instead of drawing characters for these, I’ve decided to take pictures of Browny Bear, Chicky and Purple Cat acting out library based scenarios. The posters will not have text, so will also include Makaton symbols. This is the tester poster for the idea:

I really like small yet dramatic accessories, especially if they make you feel a bit special like you are in a film or you are a character from a book , and I think these fall into this category. I have some contact lenses which are designed to make your pupils look larger so that you look like a manga/cartoon character, and I love wearing them – they also make you feel a bit like a vampire from Buffy, although they don’t look that scary, as they don’t cover your whole iris. I think these eyelashes would work well with the contacts for an even weirder effect. They are made of paper and designed by Paperself – a platform for the innovative exploration of paper for contemporary product design.

I think I like the horses best and also the smaller version of the lashes where you just have one horse poking out of each corner.

I came across the images below and really liked the spotty eye decorations. The only way I could imagine they had achieved those perfect little circles is with those little circular stickers that you get from Rymans. So I had a go myself ^. I would actually wear this somewhere, definitely.

Other dramatic lashes I like include the best of the bunch from a collaboration between Shu Uemura and Viktor & Rolf which Susie Bubble tried out ages ago. They look massive.

We have yet another small change around at my house in Brighton and two new housemates. It always seems that whoever we get moving in is always obligingly generous and friendly and also has some kind of connection with subjects or artists who I find extremely interesting. It turns out that Hannah, one of my new housemates, is a sculptor who is going out to Mexico soon to work with artist Jason de Caires Taylor. He happens to be the creator of the world’s first underwater sculpture park, where sculptures sited in clear shallow water surrounding Cancun, Isla Mujeres and Punta Nizuc form the basis of artificial reefs. Marine wildlife live around and on the sculptures, changing them structurally and adding to their narrative.

A random question, a 500 word answer, a 30 min illustration. This is the basis of Alex’s Unstruck blog experiment. This was my pictorial answer to the question ‘Can men ever really be feminists?’.

The intricately made felt sculptures and plush characters shown here are the work of Team Muji, a pair of artists currently working in Cornwall. Before they moved even further along the coast, they used to run a shop in Brighton called Toylife, which I used to walk past on my way home from uni whenever I took that particular route through the North Laine maze of streets. I’m particularly drawn to these constructions in felt, which look painstakingly detailed and make use of the whole felt colour spectrum! There is a Muju etsy shop where you can buy some small plush sculptures (currently they are producing an interestingly designed line called Astral Muju which all have a small star cutout at the centre) but these close-ups are from larger sculptures, some much larger (they look larger than lifesize, but that might be clever photography) which have been exhibited in Holland and San Francisco.

I caught a really interesting Radio 4 program the other day which was the potter Grayson Perry talking about creativity and the different ways it is viewed by society as a whole. He talked to a variety of creative people (writers Rose Tremain and Terry Pratchett, fashion designer Hussein Chalayan (FAVE), and poet and neurologist Raymond Tallis) and they contributed their ideas to the discussion. I found it all good for thinking material and agreed with most of what was said, but was surprised by the sudden end to the program and the concluding comments that Grayson made. I don’t know whether he actually thinks this entirely, or if he was just trying to stick a contrary opinion on the end of what was quite a positive exploration of the creative impulse. ‘Creativity is what drives the capitalist monster thats chewing up the planet’, ‘Maybe we are having too many ideas’ – I find this quite a disturbing view. Ok, so maybe we can keep a close watch on how we use our resources, and there is a vein of truth in the first statement, which I throw around in my brain from time to time when creating things to sell, but I think to attack creativity itself and curb it would have pretty catastrophic results.

Raymond Tallis believes that creative people try to resolve their own difficulties and heal their ‘wounds’ in life through their particular medium, and that we can relate to and understand the results because ‘We all share the human wound of living a finite life, a life with incomplete meanings’ – isnt all human activity the attempt to recover from and solve the problem of the finite life?  There’s also the evidence from brain scans that people with a creative impulse are possibly more relaxed and the signals in the brain are transmitted more slowly, and to be creative is all about wandering around and hesitating – sounds like me.

Grayson also referred to the work of Henry Darger the ‘outsider artist’ who wrote and illustrated a 15,000 page epic called the Realms of the Unreal whilst he worked as a janitor in Illinois. The huge work was only discovered after his death. Darger has been a significant influence on Grayson Perry’s own work, and it was interesting to me to see just how much this is true when I looked back at both today.

I do seem to end posts with how the subject at hand somehow relates to shoes and I see no reason to break with this tradition today. Someone has made a Darger painting into a lovely pair of KEDS – in fact theres a whole site where you can customise Keds like this!

I do like these – they are pretty mind-blowing. The ones I’ve picked out are actually on the less grotesque side of things for the artist Kris Kuksi – still scary though. It’s really worth it to go to his site and see them full screen and beautifully lit.

I live in a house with two people who have boats and one person who has lived on a houseboat. I am yet to have a go on any of these (one isn’t seaworthy yet and one owner has broken his leg), but their enthusiasm must have filtered through to me somewhat, because I’ve been seeing boat-related things everywhere. Tristam Lansdowne’s defaced and derelict architectural paintings combine aspects of different urban settings and present them as mysterious detached structures. This houseboat is a bit like an airship. Another favourite is the one below which is called ‘Tomb’ ( look here because it’s much less frustrating to navigate than his site).

Then, the always wonderful Present&Correct have come out with a poster of boats in that simple Miffy-ish style that appeals to me. Further investigation has shown me that the original designers Maddison Graphic have produced a lot of likeable things, including these paper cutout banners.

Alongside these things, a recent conversation with one of my housemates has resurrected a desire to see the Hornblower TV series again. A quick library search has confirmed that they don’t have any of the DVDs, which puts paid to any burgeoning ideas of Hornblower Nights (probably much to everyone else’s relief). There is a ‘Hornblower Companion’ apparently, which shows all of the journeys and maps etc. which sounds pretty good. Ah good old unpronounceable Ioan Gruffudd… You can keep your Desperate Housewives..: