Chemistry: creating new worlds

The Biennale Kijkduin is an international exhibition at the southerly beach resort of Kijkduin in The Hague. Sea and dunes form the natural setting for the monumental works of glass and light art. The Biennale asks artists and designers to visualise the chemical mentality in modern glass and light installations. Appropriate, as glass and transparency are inseparable from chemistry. First and foremost, glass itself is the chemical compound of mainly fused sand, calcium and sodium carbonate. And as far as science is concerned, without glass flasks and test tubes there would be no experiments, and no clarity in processes. Glass and light art is the medium par excellence for the investigative adventure of the ‘CHEMISTRY – Creating new Worlds’ exhibition. Lucy + Jorge Orta will present 'Glass, Light and Nature experiences', a newly commissioned body of work which is part of the artists' ongoing project OrtaWater

Amazonia

The Amazonia series interweaves scientific, aesthetic and cultural paradigms to offer insights into the huge diversity of living organisms and the space they occupy in the planet’s evolution. It resulted from research conducted in the Natural History Museum, London and a field expedition to the Peruvian Amazon. The primary inquiry, based on the theory of operational aesthetics, was to investigate how contemporary art can act as a trigger to provoke a deeper appreciation of the natural world and to understand the importance of biodiversity and the effects its loss will have on climate change. The thirty-seven commissioned artefacts in different media and formats were specifically created for the Jerwood Gallery at the Natural History Museum to stimulate different sensations and provoke different audience responses. The artworks focused attention on the myriad of species that depend on the eco-equilibrium of the Amazon and prompted the public to reflect on the fragile balance and coexistence of this environment. As part of the commissioning process the researchers engaged with the museum collections including entomology, botany, palaeontology and the library archive as well as accompanying scientists on the field trip to the Amazon. This led to a distinctive range of approaches, including macrophotographs, a diptych video projection, and three 1:1 porcelain sculpture casts of dinosaur fossils. The exhibition was funded by the Natural History Museum of London Contemporary Art Program to coincide with the International Year of Biodiversity

Potential Architecture

The exhibition brings together new work: sculpture, drawings and models created by Lucy + Jorge Orta during their research on new organic and modular architecture as a result of their collaborations with the Greenham partnership and other communities across Europe. Lucy Orta’s practice from the early 1990s began with a series of artworks that combined architecture, fashion and social intervention. Produced in collaboration with her partner, these works took the form of temporary refuges, prototype survival clothing, portable shelters, and tent villages for symbolic emergency situations exploring notions of identity, architecture and communication through workshops and community based actions. In 2002, Orta began working on a series entitled Totipotent Architecture marking a shift away from the body and the transient shelters, to more permanent proposals for sculpture and interventions in urban space. Totipotent Architecture is a reflection on the process of differentiation the human cell undertakes from its embryonic state, to a defined cell structural organism, the wonderful building block of our body

Lucy + Jorge Orta: food water life

Bringing together three of Orta's most important bodies of work, Lucy+Jorge Orta:Food Water Life addresses universal concerns of community, shelter, migration, and sustainable development. Beyond merely tackling these issues artistically, the work of contemporary artist Lucy Orta and her partner Jorge Orta suggests solutions by modeling fresh approaches to social dilemmas. From reclaiming discarded food for town-wide dinner celebrations to staging an international exhibition in Antarctica, their often-playful projects incorporate elements of fashion, art, and architecture, which they combine with performances, multimedia events, and public debates. Featuring hundreds of photographs of recent works, Lucy+Jorge Orta: Food Water Life includes texts by curators Zoë Ryan, Ellen Lupton, Judith Hoos Fox, and Ginger Gregg Duggan and an interview by critic Hou Hanru that provides insights into the artists’ processes and motivations

Lucy + Jorge Orta, Potential Architecture

Cells are a part of the human body; they are at the origin of its being, its feelings, its emotions, and its sufferings. Thus, they speak the language of the body. There are also cells of habitation. The relationship between people and their habitat is formed in this metaphorical cell. Living and being become a single and unique life experience. Cristina Morozzi Potential Architecture explores artists Lucy + Jorge Orta’s recent architectural endeavors that derive from their fascination with cell biology and the process of differentiation. Through drawings and sculpture, the artists conceptualize the communication process the human cell undertakes from its embryonic state, and the infinite transformations that lead to defined structural organisms. This new body of work draws from Lucy + Jorge Orta’s artistic practice, grounded in the universal concerns of community, shelter, migration, and sustainable development. Potential Architecture is a powerful rejoinder to the arbitrary boundaries that define art, architecture, and design

Block party: contemporary craft inspired by the art of the tailor

Block Party: contemporary craft inspired by the art of the tailor, is a new touring exhibition from the Crafts Council curated by Lucy Orta - Professor of Art, Fashion and the Environment at London College of Fashion, and renowned visual artist whose own practice fuses fashion, art and architecture. Block Party explores the alchemy of the centuries-old skill of tailoring by presenting work by 15 UK and international artists who push pattern-cutting beyond the fashion garment. The artists Lucy Orta has selected take pattern-cutting as a starting point to produce sculpture, ceramics, textile, moving image and collage. Through experimentation the artists have found new ways to assemble pattern shapes, not to create garments but to manipulate shape to realise new outcomes. Block Party focuses on three themes; Storytelling, Embracing the Future, and Motif and Manipulation. In Storytelling artists use pattern-cutting as a means of expression. Turner Prize-nominated Yinka Shonibare MBE presents a child mannequin, dressed in a historically accurate Victorian outfit crafted from African fabric to reference culture, race and history. Claudia Losi’s 24m whale made of woollen suit fabric was transported around the world to stimulate discussion and storytelling before being deconstructed and transformed into jackets in collaboration with fashion designer Antonio Marras. In Embracing the Future existing pattern-cutting methods are manipulated and challenged through the use of innovative processes and technologies. Simon Thorogood’s patterns are created using digital programmes whilst Philip Delamore of the Fashion Digital Studio at London College of Fashion seeks to apply the latest developments in 3D digital design to the garment making process. In Motif and Manipulation the beauty of the paper pattern block is the visual inspiration. Ceramist Charlotte Hodes directly incorporates these familiar shapes into her ceramics whilst Raw Edges re-appropriate the use of a pattern block by creating a flat paper pattern of a chair which is then filled with expandable foam to create the 3D ‘Tailored Wood Bench’

Antarctica: Lucy + Jorge Orta

For over eighteen years the work of Lucy and Jorge Orta has tirelessly investigated the global phenomena—migrations, humanitarian and environmental crises, urban decay—and reflected on some of the most urgent themes of the contemporary condition, from the end of traditional communities to new hypotheses of social cohesion, from immigration to sustainable development, ecology and intercultural dialogue. In a path marked by performances, group actions, production of objects, workshops, prototypes, publications and design projects, the Ortas have coherently interpreted a political conception of art that directly confronts social and humanitarian issues through strategies of critique and action, awareness and intervention, simultaneously implemented in both symbolic and real space. The hard-back monograph publication Antarctica (Electa Mondadori, 2008), has been published to coincide with the exhibition under the same title at the Hangar Bicocca contemporary art in Milan (April – June 2008) and takes as a starting point one of the artists’ most important bodies of work, Antarctic Village - No Borders (2007)

Lucy + Jorge Orta

The new Attenborough Arts Centre in Leicester inaugurates with a solo exhibition of the work of Lucy + Jorge Orta, from January 30 to April 24, 2016. The work on show draws a number of intersecting links between the scarcity of resources, species loss, climate change and migration. The centre piece to the exhibition is Symphony for Absent Wildlife, first commissioned by the Nuit Blanche Calgary in Canada, has been newly adapted to the gallery setting, to create an immersive audio installation experience. The audience encounters an orchestra of masked creatures sculpted from felt blankets, blowing tiny hand-sculpted bird whistles they grasp within their fragile ceramic hands. The musician’s bird song builds up to a dawn chorus with an abrupt censure, leaving the audience with a sentiment of loss. Unfolding in further galleries are sculpture from the series Life Line, Life Guard and Amazonia that weave a visual narrative, tackling issues of survival, and although many of the works were conceived over ten years ago, they are even more timely in view of recent events. Objects, vitrines and drawings derived from the artists 2009 expedition to the Peruvian Amazon, recount an oasis of diversity in a state of crisis. At the same time, they restore our focus to the world around us, the beauty of the millions of species both locally and globally that depend on the Amazon for their survival, and to the natural cycles of life and death

Changes in New Mexico Agriculture 1995

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Wave propagation in discontinuous media

Wave propagation in discontinuous media, which is of interest for design analysis of underground structures and geotechnical works in general, is studied in this paper with the scattering matrix method. This method determines the response of a system, i.e. the discontinuous medium, excited by an elastic wave. Both P, SV or SH waves can be applied to the model with any oblique angle of incidence. The scattering matrix is composed of reflection and transmission coefficients of a single joint or a set of parallel joints. The analytical solution is obtained in the frequency domain and allows one to consider multiple wave reflections between joints. Reflected and transmitted waves are calculated for one and more joints in dry or fluid filled conditions. The solutions obtained are compared with analytical and numerical solutions available in the literature or obtained independently by using the Distinct Element Metho