Friday Bliss # 20

Thankfully we haven't had the snow that had been forecast which has meant I've been able to get out and about this week.  It has been cloudy, but at least dry.  I was glad about that as I had made a date to meet a friend for a catch-up chat over coffee and cake in one of the cafés in the city centre.  

I was interested to see this huge Winter flowering shrub (a viburnum) in one of the small gardens at the side of a city square called Barker's Pool. There were fresh bedding plants (daisies) in the garden and in other planters dotted around the city centre. A climbing rose is also doing very well in the shelter of this garden space.

Catkins are out too.

Before meeting my friend I went into the Winter Garden. The information boards are often set up

exhibiting the work of local art and photography groups. I shall return there soon as there are one or two exhibitions in the actual art gallery rooms that look very interesting such as Christopher Dresser: Pioneer of Modern Product Design and Leonardo Da Vinci: A Life in Drawing.

Meeting up with my friend in the café area of a bookshop we enjoyed our time together.  The cappuccino was good and the polenta and orange cake was a different choice from normal, very moist and tasty. Whilst I was in the bookshop I ordered a book which caught my eye on a blog dedicated to historical fiction and non fiction. I've read a series of novels written by Nancy Bilyeau set in Tudor England. The Blue, however, is set in the 18th century and I'm hoping that I will enjoy this book which is not available to reserve at the library yet - the place where I usually get most of my reading material.

In the 18th century London, porcelain is the most seductive of commodities: fortunes are made and lost upon it.  For Genevieve Planché, an English-born descendant of Huguenot refugees, porcelain holds far less allure; she wants to be an artist, a painter of international repute, but nobody takes the idea of a female artist seriously in London.  If only she could reach Venice.  When Genevieve meets the charming Sir Gabriel Courtenay he offers her an opportunity she can't refuse; if she learns the secrets of porcelain he will send her to Venice. But, in particular she must learn the secrets of the colour blue... The ensuing events take Genevieve deep into England's emerging industrial heartland...

(information on Nancy Bilyeau's website)

Joining Riitta's linkup Friday Bliss # 20

The Winter Garden, Sheffield (2)

Here are some more facts about the Winter Garden in Sheffield, this time about the architectural features:-

The Winter Garden is glazed with over 2,100 metres of glass, uses 900 cubic ms of concrete and 80 tonnes of steel.  The paving is grit stone which was sourced from local quarries.

The primary support structure consists of 10 pairs of glue laminated timber arches.  The wood used is larch - a durable timber which will silver over time. The building is one of the largest glue laminated timber structures in the UK.

The Winter Garden has been designed to be highly energy efficient and provide a model of sustainable development in a city centre site.

Environmental conditions are controlled by a Building Management System

This controls opening and closing of vents as well as under-floor heating.  High level fans keep air circulating to prevent cold damp air stratifying around the plants and to move warm air so as not to cook the plant tissue.

Because of its height the Winter Garden is a suitable place to hang art installations and I saw an amazing one recently. It had been installed to celebrate the official launch of Sheffield University's research facility, the Florey Institute, which aims to tackle the global problem of antibiotic resistance and infectious disease. The institute is named in honour of Sir Howard Florey who conducted the first ever clinical trials of penicillin. Today infectious bacterial species are becoming increasingly resistant and new ways to combat infectious disease are needed.
The sculpture also had relevance to two scientific festivals in the city that took place over recent months, the University of Sheffield's KrebsFest, which celebrates the life and work of the University's Nobel Prize-winning academic Sir Hans Krebs. He was awarded the prize in Physiology or Medecine in 1953 for discovering the Krebs cycle - the conversion of food into energy within a cell and 'The Hidden Worlds Festival' whose theme was about shedding light on unseen wonders in nature.

   

The giant floating sculpture of an E. coli bacterium was created by Luke Jerram. His multidisciplinary practice involves the creation of sculptures, installations and live art projects around the world including glass microbiology art works that are in museum collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, London and Shanghai. You can see some of them on his web site here. They are amazing.

The sculpture is about five million times bigger than a real E. coli bacterium.  It is so large that it had to be produced by Cameron Balloons, the world's largest hot air balloon manufacturer. 

Jerram's work is designed to make the microscopic world around us visible and demonstrate the importance of bacteria in our lives. Some forms of E. coli can cause illness or death, but scientists need to study bacterium in order to further scientific research. The artist said "Making visible the microscopic world around us, the artwork was made as an experimental object to contemplate and allow the public to experience a dizzying perception of scale.  I'm interested to find out what the public make of the artwork. Does the bacteria look scary, beautiful, comical or alien?"  

What do you think?  When I first saw the installation I thought it was beautiful as a piece of artwork and wondered about the mechanics of hanging it from the arches of the building. I was curious to find out more about what had inspired the artist to create it and had to do some research which I've shared here. 

It was a coincidence that within two weeks of seeing the sculpture I had the opportunity to visit Firth Court when I went there for the book festival event. As it houses the University of Sheffield's Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology and Biomedical Science there were other artworks displayed there in the Entrance Hall and on the staircase leading to Firth Hall where my meeting was held. Apparently Luke Jerram's E. coli sculpture had also been hung in Firth Hall, but because it's a listed building the inflatable could not be suspended in a conventional manner. You can read here how a solution was found on the website of the specialist rigging company, UK Rigging, who did the work.   

 Firth Court

An abstract painting of the Krebs Cycle by Florence Blanchard  is on the wall to the right. Florence Blanchard is also a well known street artist.  She decorated the end window in the main corridor of the Millennium Gallery which I featured on a photo scavenger hunt blog post here.

Model (Green Fluorescent Protein) - Origami by Seiko Kinoshita, textile artist

Sir Hans Krebs (portrait by Keith Robinson)

Chinese New Year Celebrations

Chinese New Year celebrations took place in London last weekend and I'm sharing some of my daughter's photos as well as some others of my own from last Sunday when I was in Sheffield city centre for a morning church service and happened on a Chinese group parading through the streets on our way back to the car park.

As well as the parades, street dancing, music and stalls selling food there were special stage performances around the Trafalgar Square area.

Below Sunday morning in Sheffield.

The group had passed before I could get out my camera to take photos so I only got some back views. 'The Lion' was extremely lively and nimbly climbed up and down steps and along the edge of one of the raised pools outside the City Hall in the piazza called Barker's Pool!

'The Lion' dancing on the edge of the pool

Other entertainment was going on in Barker's Pool!  It wasn't my 'cup of tea' .........

so I'll leave you with some of the plants and flowers in the Winter Garden when I was in the city yesterday doing some shopping.  I was glad to spend some time in there on a very cold day.

Steel City Cascade

Do you remember the mobile in the Winter Garden in Sheffield city made of stainless steel wire and sheet and recycled material that I featured recently?

As with any piece of art, especially something so detailed, the more you look the more you see.  I've been drawn to this piece several times when I've been passing through the Winter Garden, which is a space frequently used to exhibit public art. I found more information in a leaflet that had been left for visitors. 

It's called Steel City Cascade and is the result of an art project for the Sheffield Children's Festival 2013 as part of the celebrations to mark the 100 years of the city's stainless steel production. Hundreds of young people across the city made the individual pieces to produce the finished work of art.  

The young designers wanted to show Sheffield as an urban space which also has connections to nature, particularly water, both in past and present times. They based the main frame on the river network since the waterways were a key feature in the establishment of metalworking in the city where there were many waterwheels that powered the grindstones before the invention of stainless steel.   There are five rivers in the area the Don, the Sheaf, the Rivelin, the Loxley and the Porter and their names stand out in blue. Historical buildings that were involved in the cutlery industry feature as well as vocabulary used in the metalworking industry.  A set of figures representing the people of the city were designed and laser cut in stainless steel and other portraits were made in wire and stainless steel strip.

The young people took part in different practical workshops exploring the qualities of stainless steel wire and sheet metal, looking at the designs and patterns that had been used in the creation of original items of cutlery and then worked on their own designs and pieces to make up the whole of the mobile.

I've seen the work on days when there were grey skies and blue and when the sun has lit up one

individual piece or another and you really need to see it in person to appreciate all the detail. It's an interesting and meaningful piece of art when you realise the educational and creative work that went into the project to produce it. I was also fascinated by the way it was hung from such a height in order to display it. You can just see the wires in the above photo.  I would have liked to have been there when that was done!

The Winter Garden is a great space to display artwork and as a venue for different events as well as a place to sit for a while and the exotic plants are rather special too.