BAIMA CANAL RESTORER

REVIEWED BY CYCLIFIER.ORG

Ecological restoration in a sewage-filled canal with public space development.

The Baima canal restorer by Todd Ecological is a case of ecological engineering in combination with the creation of public space. A city canal was polluted with the sewage of thousands of inhabitants, thus creating health, safety, and odor problems. John Todd installed a linear restoration element in the canal that aerates and supports the growth of aquatic plants that take up nutrients to counter the eutrophic effects of sewage. Along the growth-supports, there was also built a new pedestrian transportation route. 

Studio ThingThing:

"We engineer and fabricate our own versions of industrial manufacturing machines to allow us to experiment with materials typically unavailable to designers. We make and modify plastic extruders, injection molders, rotational molding, compression molds, and more - developing an expertise and authorship in the entire making process. Much of our work involves post-consumer, hand-recycled high density polyethylene plastic from Detroit, Michigan. Post-consumer HDPE is typically mixed together to create a tough grayish plastic used in industrial capacities. By sorting and processing these plastics manually, we can utilize the full spectrum of bright colors. Folgers Coffee reds, Arm and Hammer yellows, Downy light blues..."

Top: Katsushige Folding Screen (Kyoto depicted), Kanazawa Museum

Bottom: Folding Screen, Rinpa School, Moon over Grasses

Sky photography from Instagram user @matialonsor

My favorite from my mom’s lectures in high school photography class:

Jerry Uelsmann... I miss those 90s fantasy worlds

Born in Detroit on June 11, 1934, Jerry Uelsmann received his B.F.A. degree at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1957 and his M.S. and M.F.A. at Indiana University in 1960. He began teaching photography at the University of Florida in Gainesville in 1960 (“my first job offer”). He became a graduate research professor of art at the university in 1974, and is now retired from teaching. He lives in Gainesville, Florida.

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Yuko Nishikawa about: 

“I am Yuko Nishikawa, a Brooklyn-based Japanese designer/contemporary ceramicist specializing in fantastical lighting, whimsical decor accessories and collectible objet d'art. With an Interior and Industrial Design background, I handcraft one-of-a-kind lamps, chandeliers, sculptures, vases and tableware. I also run a monthly Salon at Forest, a gathering and conversation of creative minds in my studio.

I make objects and spaces drawing inspiration from ideas that we tend to think normal and investigate and offer alternatives in a joyful way. I create functions and rules for imaginary places and objects and use these ideas to create physical forms in ceramics. My mission is accomplished when my work transforms a space into a fascinating encounter...”

Yuko Shimizu

From About Page:

YUKO SHIMIZU (清水裕子) is A multi-award-winning Japanese illustrator based in New York City.  Yuko is an instructor at The School of Visual Arts and has almost 20 years of experience illustrating. Her work includes multiple disciplines; from pages of The New York Times, TIME, Newsweek, The New Yorker to WIRED,  covers for DC Comic, Penguin, and Scholastic, advertising for Apple, Microsoft, Intel, Universal Pictures, SONY, Paramount, MTV, Nike, Hasbro, and Target, to name a few. Additionally, she has collaborated with the Smithsonian Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Library of Congress. In 2020, collaboration with Artechouse brought her drawings to large-scale interactive experiences. Yuko is a two-time Hugo Award nominee (2019, 2020), has won more than 15 medals from the Society of Illustrators since 2004, and was recently awarded the Caldecott Honor (2021), one of the highest awards for picture books, for her work on the children’s book The Cat Man of Aleppo (Penguin, 2020).  Yuko was also chosen as one of the “100 Japanese People the World Respects (世界が尊敬する日本人１００）” by Newsweek Japan in 2009.

FUN FACT: Illustration is actually Yuko’s second career.  Although art has always been her passion, she had initially chosen a more practical path of studying advertising and marketing at Waseda University and had a career in corporate PR for 11 years before moving to New York to study art for the first time. Yuko graduated with MFA from SVA’s Illustration as Visual Essay Program in 2003 and has been illustrating and teaching since.

FUN FACT 2: Please do not mix Yuko up with another Yuko Shimizu (not me!). This Yuko did NOT create Hello Kitty.

Inuit artist Kenojuak Ashevak, who developed her art from the embroidery that she learned as a child, lived in one camp after another in eastern Canada’s far north well into the 1950s. She and her first husband, Johnniebo Ashevak, also an artist, eventually settled in Cape Dorset on Baffin Island so that their children could go to school.

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Stephen Francis, Eskasoni, algebra tutor uses Mi’kmaw 8-pointed stars to teach math

 “There's a lot of angles [to making a star] and it has to make sense, basically. It has to be perfect, even one-tenth of a degree, eight times about that you're one degree off and your star won't close. It's very important to be precise.My classroom ... is also my workshop. A lot of my students — I show them how to use a table saw or I showed them how to use a cutoff saw and how to cut basically. It's incorporated in how I teach them math.”

Ara Güler, 1928-2018, Turkish-Armenian photojournalist... everything I loved about Cartier-Bresson, but better.

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Sarah Khan (@mindforking) 

Pregnant with her second child, Khan expressed that her work reflects a childlike imagination, making reality out of nearly impossible and inventive circumstances. As a mother of a toddler during a pandemic, her recent life has been rather insular at home; however, she doesn’t consider these moments mundane. She draws inspiration from the way children design and create new worlds, characterizing their image-making as “…some kind of witchcraft because of all the crazy, imaginative patterns they make.”

She recognizes the potential in slower, thoughtful moments. Working within a set amount of time towards a scheduled exhibition was a new way of working for her, but she didn’t let the deadlines become daunting. She approached the residency calmly, methodically setting aside a few hours each day while balancing caring for her child with the help of her partner. In our meeting, she articulated an enjoyment in considering the implications of everyday life and its dualities. She finds that most things have both a light and dark side—the dark side can of course be overwhelming, even tortuous at times. On the other hand, all of life’s experiences have the capacity to bestow an astounding amount of joy.

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Geoff McFetridge (@mcfetridge) (studio website)

Profiled on the movie Beautiful Losers

Aurelie Guillaume (@mlleguillaume)

My work celebrates the history of enameling and its longstanding tradition of storytelling…  Using traditional techniques, my work revives the medium through a contemporary context fuelled by street art, comics, Pop art and counterculture. Employing a combination of jewelry techniques and illustration, my work mixes high and low art, while transporting viewers into a world more colorful and dreamlike than our own. Through the process of enameling, my illustrations transcend the two-dimensional realm of paper and are given new life in the physical world as wearable objects. With this work, I am reviving the traditions of enameling, as well as bringing sculpture and illustration into the context of contemporary jewelry.

Born in Montréal in 1990, Aurélie Guillaume studied art at the Cégep du Vieux Montréal from 2006 to 2012.  While trained as an illustrator and graphic designer, she eventually found the computer-based design process limiting.  Wanting to work more with her hands, she switched to jewelry and decided to pursue coursework at the École de Joaillerie in Montréal.  While there she was introduced to enameling by her instructor Christine Yelle and “fell in love with the technique.”  In her third year she met Pamela Ritchie, a jeweler and professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design who told her about NSCAD’s program, facilities, and educational philosophy.  She subsequently enrolled there earning her BFA in jewelry design and metalsmithing in 2015.  While at NSCAD, she studied with four instructors in the metals and jewelry program: Pamela Ritchie, Kye-Yeon Son, Lillian Yuen, and Tom Ferrero. However, it was Lillian Yuen who had the most profound influence on her work and “helped her become the artist she is today.”  She left the school with broad-ranging expertise in metalwork and a great passion for enameling.

A master of the cloisonné technique, Guillaume produces vividly colored brooches inspired by her love of comic books, cartoons, and other popular media.  While the titles she gives her figures meld rich layers of reference and content, her narratives are open-ended as she leaves the ultimate meaning of her work to the wearer and the viewer.    The artist also considers these large brooches sculptural panels that may be displayed on easels when not worn.

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Wikipedia: Shin Takamatsu (born August 5, 1948 in Nima, Shimane) is a leading Japanese architect. After he obtained PhD from Graduate School of Engineering, Kyoto University, in 1980, he became a lecturer at Osaka University of Arts in 1981, an associate professor at Kyoto Seika University in 1987, a professor at Graduate School of Engineering, Kyoto University in 1997 and professor emeritus at Kyoto University in 2013.[1] Takamatsu's futuristic looking buildings often use anthropomorphic or mechanical imagery.[2] 

Pariwat Studio Profile: 

Pariwat Anantachina, an artist, a graphic designer, THE UNI_FORM STUDIOco-founder, who sometimes still yearns to be an architect. I exhibited my work both locally and internationally. My clients include Google, Agoda, L’USINE, the Artling, Rosewood Bangkok, Siam Discovery, King Power and more. Currently, I am nurturing a publishing house called Arc Press, furtively collecting antiques, and doing art gradually yet unceasingly.

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Ps.

I was born in a Chinese family in Ratchaburi, Thailand, then moved to Bangkok, where I grew up with MTV and alternative songs during my teenage years. At present, I am based in the outskirts of Bangkok.

Janet Echelman, fiber artist--but also site-specific, spatial, lighting... her work becomes architecture.

Images sourced from an article about her work in Metal Magazine

Lithuanian-America Samuel Bak, 1933-present; Bak is a survivor of the Holocaust

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