Anarchy at Cook & Co

There's Anarchy in Avondale and a mutiny on the high seas of Cook & Co as Octavia Cook looks back to the days before the establishment of Cook & Co. In these rebellious teenage years there was the Cook brand when notions of jewellery and value were tried out and thrown in the air - like these wigs in Wig Riot 2010 (pictured).

Beneath the Blue - Joanna Langford

Just fresh from the NewDowse where she has installed a work for the exhibition Under Construction, Joanna Langford moved into our space for the weekend to hang and construct Beneath the Blue.

We talked to Jo about the work and possible new directions for her 'architecture of the fantastical'.

MNG: Someone said something interesting about your work recently in the context of your use of skewers. They said that traditionally that was how sculpture and spatial relationships were taught at art schools, using skewers to delineate space and as the basis for forms. Which makes your work as much as sculpture as it does about architecture... any thoughts on that?

JL: I think of my work as installation or sculpture or paintings in real space. In a way I think it's all quite similar - there is an interest in materials, form, space and illusion.

MNG: These latest wall works also seem to be about some kind of expanded painting or drawing, would you agree?

JL: I do a lot of photoshop drawings when I am working towards an installation. This allows me to play with the materials and motifs in virtual space. The wall works that I made for Beneath the Blue originated from these drawings. I had also painted a wall in my studio blue to create a ‘blue screen’ for an animation I am making (a blue screen of green screen is often used in film so you can film action in the foreground and add a back ground later). I started to adopt this screen for the background for my drawings.

MNG: With the floor works we are back in familiar Jo Langford territory, except that the view has shifted to Iceland or the Antarctic...

JL: Imagery of Iceland has been lurking in my consciousness since I did a residency there in 2008. I am interested in landscapes that exist in the real but that have a feeling of the fantastic. Iceland is one of these places. The expansive lava fields and smoky geothermal happenings in the snow-scape makes it feel otherworldly. There is also a sense of unease in this landscape that hints at the drama that is going on beneath us - a mass that is in flux, a gurgling and surging up.

MNG: In earlier work you have used liquorcie allsorts and wafers to build your constructions and in the Any Dream series you have used icing sugar. How do you connect confectionary and the landscape/urbanscape (the delicacy seems perfect)?

JL: I am primarily interested in the formal qualities of these materials - the color and texture.

From the stairway to the heavens - Joanna Langford

Joanna Langford's Beneath the Blue series moves away from her 'stairways to heavens', and finds us up above the streets amongst the clouds in an urban skyline clutterd with aerials, and cell phone towers.

Delicate threads 'draw' silhouettes of masting lit by tiny LED lights that glow from their uppermost tips.