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19th October 2015
The V&A 's David Bowie and Alexander McQueen Savage Beauty exhibitions provided insights into the visionary genius of fashion leaders. It’s current exhibitionTextiles of India explores the origins of producing beautiful threads from the earth’s raw materials
Blues, reds, yellows and greens
India has provided the world with cotton and silk for centuries. Indian cotton was known to the Romans as “woven winds.” By the 1630’s fine quality, cheap fabrics imported from India by the Dutch and the British caused the complaint, “You can’t tell servant from master.”
The art of extracting colour from nature begins with a nod to indigo dyeing. Indigo is the magical blue colour derived from the leaves of the plant Indigofera tinctoria. And, India’s name is inextricably linked with both indigo and Indikon, the ancient Greek word for dye. Issac Newton named the sixth colour of his prism after it in 1660 when the East India Company were importing the pigment into England. An infinite array of patterns can be produced on cloth by string or wax resist dip-dyeing.
From the deepest red to the lightest pink, the shades so indicative of India’s crazily colourful chintz, are extracts from the root bark of the chay plant (Oldenlandia umbellata) which grows around the southern tip of India and in Sri Lanka. Unlike indigo, chay requires a mordant or a fixative to bind colour with cloth. A vibrant golden orange extract of turmeric flowers, plants and roots (Curcuma longa) combines with indigo to make green. Surprisingly, pomegranate rind is rich in tannins from which numerous earthy and yellow tones come.
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June 2015
by Steven M Druker, Clear River Press, Salt Lake City, UT, USA.
In this revealing book American lawyer Steven Druker uncovers the skullduggery committed since the mid-1970’s by high ranking scientists and organisations on both sides of the Atlantic. It was the US Government’s apathy, with its weak legislation of genetic engineering, that prompted Druker, a public safety lawyer and founder of the Alliance of Biointegrity, to initiate a lawsuit against the US Department of Agriculture in 1998. By forcing the handover of copies of its internal files he made public the blatant collusion with the GM companies in violating its own food safety regulations.
Dr and Dame Jane Goodall, the world's leading primatologist, writes in her glowing forward that this is the most important book in 50 years for longterm planetary sustainability. She lent her unreserved support at its' launch in London in April, timely since, under pressure from the US, the UK and Europe are considering waiving long standing restrictions on GMOs.
Druker dismantles the assumptions that GM is safe and will fulfil the promise of solving the world’s food problems through the manipulation of genes, a process that is imprecise and impossible to recall from the environement. He delves into the abuse of science by those intent on reducing the whole of the organism to parts that can be controlled by an elite few. And he explains that engineering a new gene is only possible by first splicing it with a strain of E coli bacteria and a piece of lab constructed, recombinant DNA - two strands of DNA joined together - one being made of a cloning vector such as a tumour or virus.
It was our most august scientific institution, the Royal Society, which targeted Arpad Pusztai when he worked at the Rowett Institute, whose design won out over 30 others as a protocol to test genetically engineered potatoes. Their attempts to crush his findings of significant physiological problems in rats have set off alarm bells that have not stopped ringing. Druker states that since ‘no two GM insertion events are the same’, Pusztai’s potato experiment cannot be repeated because his results were destroyed by the British Government, indicating how much they threatened their agenda to promote GM technology.
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1st February 2015
Seedy Sunday festival is the UK's biggest and longest-running community seed swap event [1]. This year as many as 3000 people came along and about 10,000 packs of seed crossed the seed swap tables. Given the boom in growing your own, it’s understandable that so many people are expressing concerns about a proposed new EU law that threatens swapping seed, growing heritage varieties and even saving your own seed from year to year.
Caroline Lucas MP for Brighton Pavilion and Britain’s first Green MP, has raised this threat to civil liberties with the Environment, Food and Farming Minister several months ago. She asked George Eustice to oppose the obligatory registration of seed varieties and to support voluntary rather than compulsory registration and testing for all seeds that are not GM, patented or hybrid. Since then the EU’s proposals have been amended, but not for the better. In fact they now represent an even greater threat to sustainable biodiverse agriculture and consumer choice [2].
In particular the plans further concentrate the EU’s seed market into the hands of just a few corporations, whilst exemptions from the regulations for small scale seed swaps wouldn’t protect Brighton’s Seedy Sunday. Caroline Lucas has written to DEFRA to stand up for gardeners and farmers that want to grow heritage varieties and exchange seeds.
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23rd January 2015
The Café Art exhibition in the cosy café in Hampstead School of Art on a cold winter night was a heart-warming event. All of the artists taking part have in some way been affected by homelessness. Café Art was set up in 2012 over a cup of coffee by philanthropists Michael and Paul to give this different group of artists a chance to re-connect with society.
So far around thirty-one cafés in London are participating by lending their walls to Café Art projects (www.cafeart.org.uk) And, this colourful network has outreached to Bristol, Bath and Bournemouth. The Guardian has hosted a Café Art exhibition in their foyer and Christie’s housed a pop-up event. Picture exchanges between Café Art in London, Fresh Arts in New York and Home Ground Services in Melbourne have also helped to highlight the cause and International exposure is a great confidence boost for the artists concerned.
“Fundamentally, Café Art works because it gives an opportunity for ten different homeless charities to get together without the need for competition amongst them. For us, the purpose is to get the artist to the next level and to get the public seeing their work. When an artist sells a piece of work we connect them directly with the buyer and we don’t take a commission,” explained Michael.
Now in its third year artwork and photographs are utilised to produce a glossy Calendar. Last year this helped to raise £18,000 for the vendors, photographers and art groups - 65% of the sales income, with the remaining income going back into the project. The evocative images for this year’s My London Calendar emerged with support and training from The Royal Photographic Society. An experienced panel of judges whittled down 3,000 entries to twenty and members of the public chose the final twelve. The sublime result is on sale here: http://cafeart.org.uk/cafe-art-calendar/buy-my-london-calendar/
Community projects are vital to getting people re-integrated into society. The number of people sleeping on the streets of London has increased by 43% since 2010/11 to 6,437 and is steadily rising [1]. Over half are between 26-45 year old and 12% are female. The financial crisis has hit homelessness hard in other capital cities too. A not for profit organisation in Athens has taken advice and inspiration from the Café Art model to set up a similar project and is busy seeking its own funding to do so.
Mark and Tom are two articulate and aware artists at the private view. Tom Hair, whose art has been displayed in previous ehibitions said: “It is a learning curve, the journey of visual communication of both the product and process of rehabilitation - a rehabilitation of the self both within and without.” Mark’s portrait painting is a carnival of blue and orange. Intriguingly, the art of those affected by homelessness expresses courage, hope and spirit through colour in distinct contrast to the monotone cityscapes exhibited in the gallery downstairs: a tacit reminder that some of the world’s great artists were transient.
Flower paintings by Barry Morrisey
[1] Thames Reach www.thamesreach.org.uk
https://www.facebook.com/cafeartforhomelessartists
Hampstead School of Art http://www.hampstead-school-of-art.org/partner-event/events/cafe-art-exhibition-at-hsoa.html
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29th April 2013
Sam Burcher reviews a spate of meetings at Westminster to protect the bees.
Campaigners are celebrating the EU’s decision at the end of April to ban neonicotinoids on flowering crops for two years, starting this year. The decision comes on the back of some vigorous campaigns and protesting by various UK groups concerned about protecting bees from this type of pesticide.
Several meetings about the detrimental effects of neonicotinoids on bees have taken place at Westminster over the past few months. Most recently the March of the Beekeepers swarmed on Parliament Square in late April to protest the UK Government abstaining to vote for the EU ban.
Dame Vivienne Westwood and Katherine Hamnett CBE, pioneers of British fashion, marched with angry beekeepers to Downing Street to deliver the Save the Bee petition of 2.6 million signatures calling for the UK government to take action. Three days later, a second vote in Brussels banned neonicotinoids with the support of 15 EU countries. The ban will not apply to winter cereals and crops not attractive to bees.
Owen Paterson, the UK’s Environment Secretary, abstained from the EU vote both times in favour of supporting the makers of neonicotinoids, Bayer and Syngenta. In defence of the Government’s abstention, DEFRA has said they await results of their own further studies. Consequently, it’s view that the risk to bee populations from neonicotinoids, as currently used is low, ignores the Precautionary Principle, the scientific research that demonstrates that neonicotinoids harm bees and the fundamental flaws in the pesticides regulatory system.
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11th October 2011
On the 30th September 2011, the CEO’s of two British oil companies were found guilty of Ecocide at the Supreme Court in Westminster. However, the trial was a mock one, organised by environmental rights lawyer, barrister and author Polly Higgins, in which she could test the robustness of her concept called Ecocide, a proposed legal mechanism to halt the destruction of the planet.
But this facinating event took a bold new step towards making the individuals responsible for crimes against humanity, nature and future generations accountable for their actions.
The prosecution, the defence, the judge, the jury, and the expert witnessess were made up of real people giving their time for free. Only the defendants, played by actors, and the oil companies were fictional. The indictments were based on recent real-life environmental events.
If properly enshrined into International Law under the Rome Statute (2002), Ecocide would become the fifth crime against the peace of the planet. The four existing international crimes against peace are; Genocide, Crimes Against Humanity, War Crimes and Crimes of Aggression.
The indictment against the first defendant was in relation to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, where 250 million gallons of crude oil poured into the deep ocean creating a “dead zone” some 200 square km, killing and oiling birds, and damaging the pristine mangrove swamps in the Mississippi Delta. The leak was not capped for four months.