Paint, soap, oil - galaxies, emotions and beauty.

I'm feeling a little emotional this morning. Freelance has been wonderful so far but the prospect of leaving a placement I've loved is always hard. Maybe that's why I found these beautiful paint, oil and soap films actually quite meaningful and emotional.

Watching the colour forms rip apart and form beautiful new patterns is like an analogy for life. So one beautiful whole ends and will be replaced by new beauty, new forms. Freelance too is full of uncertainty, ever changing and full of new beautiful experiences.

Dance magic lights dance

Love this beautiful slightly haunting short film made by Cirque du Soleil, ETH Zurich and Verity Studios. The film was made by hiding drones indie lampshades so no CGI was employed. Those lampshades are actually dancing!

I love how cutting edge technology contrasts with old fashioned music, craft and something as everyday and normal as a lamp shade.

Thanks to my friend Paula for this one.

SPARKED: Behind the Technology: http://youtu.be/7YqUocVcyrE

Cirque du Soleil: http://www.cirquedusoleil.com/
ETH Zurich: http://www.idsc.ethz.ch/Research_DAndrea
Verity Studios: http://www.veritystudios.com/

Detroit: Beautiful and Bust

So today came the news that the city of Detroit has filed for bankruptcy. It will mean that in future the stricken state will have difficulty raising cash, presumably much needed to stimulate economic growth in the area.

I have never visited Detroit but it sounds and looks like a place with a heart and a soul. It's no shiny metropolis or picture postcard. It has seen things, and it has endured suffering. I think I am partly drawn to it because I am from Swansea in South Wales. Swansea was once an important shipping port and at the heart of tin and copper mining. In fact it earned the nicknamed "Copperopolis". Now it is a city trying to reinvent itself as a tourist town. Its people, the great majority, are not wealthy and jobs are scarce. I imagine this is the case in Detroit too, once the proud centre of the nation's automobile industries.

There was a great advert by Chrysler which really should go back on the air following this news. It is a defiant rallying cry - we are not beaten, we will fight on.



The great thing about towns and cities that have suffered is the art that comes out of them - music, poetry, paintings, photography. Perhaps this is because artists are often said to produce their best work when they are anguished or have dark subject matters. There have been some beautiful art projects focusing on empty and abandoned homes in the suburbs of Detroit. Kevin Bauman's photography project entitled 100 Abandoned Houses was his attempt to document the forgotten areas of the city - often areas which were once inhabited by the wealthy, now in sad states of disrepair. Dreams that once were.

Another interesting project focusing on abandoned houses is Ice House Detroit. Artist Gregory Holm and architect Matthew Radune sprayed an abandoned house with gallons of water so that the entire house froze. The house is meant to symbolise the contemporary state of Detroit. Read their blog about the project here. 

Bankrupcy seems to be when a person/state/country reaches rock bottom. So Detroit, the only way is up. Maybe this is an exciting time. A time of crisis and change. Certainly it should make the US government sit up and take notice.

So Detroit, good luck. I look forward to seeing what you give the world next.

Adgirl. 

Rock-Star Requests

Everyone knows what to put in a rock star diva's dressing rooms.  Yes, just the blue smarties - or so the joke goes. Henry Hargreaves however proves this is no exaggeration. He has created beautiful still life images in a classical style of the backstage requests of rock stars and divas. Some are rather modest (some gummy bears), some more extravagant, others are a little more telling (condoms and KY jelly).

Take a look

See more at Vice magazine

Britney Spears

Fish and chips, McDonald’s cheeseburgers without the buns, 100 prunes and figs, a framed photo of Princess Diana.

Busta Rhymes

Twenty-four pieces of fried chicken, Rough Rider condoms, Guinness.

Mariah Carey  

Cristal Champagne, bendy straws.

Van Halen 

Herring in sour cream, large tube of KY jelly, M&M's (Warning: absolutely no brown ones).

Thanks to my friend Thomas for this post. You rock man!

Um...like the best makeup video ever..seriously

Wanna pull more boys? Want a date - like - now? Well look no further. Here is makeup guru Shannon's guide to doing like SO attractive makeup that boys might just dump their girlfriends for you.



Ok so maybe not. But don't you know people who must seriously believe this? My Secondary school was full of them. One girl in my class used to shave her eyebrows off and pencil them in higher up her forehead.

Now here's a confession. Sometimes I find it really fun to do a few chav makeup things. And sometimes I go too far. Well I am a swansea girl! At my University reunion I faked tanned myself twice over. I thought I looked the bomb. But in all the photos of me I look orange next to everyone else. Lesson is - only chav it up when amongst similarly minded people.

Oh and this was the worst photo of the night - the candlelight and the quality of the camera wasn't helping my cause....Tangoed. As my aunty kindly told me recently "you have some awful pictures of yourself online". Nothing like family to keep your feet on the ground.

Check out Beautylish for a bunch of really great makeup and hair demos. Don't worry, my university reunion look isn't there.

Adgirl x

Peace One Day

On September 21st every year the United Nations have resolved that there will be an international Day of Peace. The day is the brain child of  Jeremy Gilley, who is supported by Jude Law as well as other celebrity figures such as Angelina Jolie and Annie Lennox. Here is a film documenting the struggles that Gilley has faced in creating and promoting the day. Its an impressive film as well as an emotional one. It's an hour long but its well worth watching. It is particularly inspiring that one man could do so much in a world where people often think that individual voices are powerless.



So far Peace One Day has achieved a day of ceasefire with the Taliban in Afghanistan when children have been immunised, food drops, reunited child soldiers with their families and got people all over the globe to raise money for the peace effort.

Clouds beautiful daydreams

Today's theme send around in the creative department has been clouds. First we have Berndnaut Smilde who uses fog machines and careful controlling of temperature and humidity to create little clouds in empty rooms which he then photographs. Here are the beautiful results:

Creating weather is a bit like playing God. Not in a bad way it's just awe inspiring. If you'd like to see the clouds being created watch the video below. The artist speaks in Dutch so if that means nothing to you (like me) just skip forward to the beautiful cloud bits.

The second of our beautiful cloud artists creates clouds of colour. Brice Bischoff takes pictures of swirling mists of colour in the Bronson Caves in Los Angeles. These caves have been the settings of many movies - they've seen explosions, gun fights and even stone age people. These clouds are just as staged - in fact they could be seen as records of performances. They are made by the artist himself dancing covered with brightly coloured paper and captured in long exposure. Bischoff calls the result a "chaotic specter of fictional realities" against the unchanging landscape.

Personally I find the last one the most haunting. It looks like a man on fire - or an angel falling. If you know of any other artists who work with clouds in some way let me know. 

Thanks to Debs and Thomas for this post.

Barbie debate goes on

If anyone would like to see the videos that my friend Giles mentioned in his reply to my post about Barbie advertising then here they are.

The first is the Nike campaign for children being encouraged to play Sport:



The second is the scary video which hows you how to look like a perfect plastic Barbie doll.



I would like to stand up for the way girls play with dolls. While I am in no way saying that Barbies are good roll models, playing with dolls is a learning experience. Personally I am the type of person that role-plays scenarios in preparation for confrontations, issues etc. Even now I talk to myself when I'm alone and play out what I would say to someone in my head if a situation arose. This helps me straighten out what my view is and sometimes even stops me from saying things I could regret.

The problem is that if little girls learn and practice for life with dolls, they won't ever chose dolls that are ugly, or over-weight, or have muffin tops. Children are naturally drawn to beauty. It's hard-wired into all of us. So what can Barbie do? I'd say that Barbie are making the right moves. If only they would stop making everything pink.

So is Barbie a good role model as they claim? Or is it manipulative? Or both perhaps? Please send me your thoughts.

Dove - Beauty Pressure

Dove continue to do good work in promoting healthy body images to women. Here they show the onslaught of perfect body imagery children face in their daily lives. And leave you with the message that you should talk to your children about body image and beauty before the industry gets them.



A while back I went for a hypnotherapy session. I wanted to sort out a habit I have of obsessing over my skin. Every night I look at every pore in the mirror before I go to sleep and feel miserable about every imperfection. It drives Fiance mental. Anyway the hypnotherapist told me to think of the first time when I could remember something happening with my skin. I told her I was 6 and my mother was holding me down and squeezing my face between her nails. It hurt like hell. She wasn't being cruel - she had seen a blackhead. The message I had taken from this was that blackheads were something dirty, something that HAD to be gotten rid of, something that you got punished for. The hynotherapist then asked me to imagine myself aged six playing in the garden with a bit of mud on my face, she asked me if 6 year old me was ugly with the mud on her face. I said no, she is beautiful and then I cried. I cried until tears rolled down my cheeks. The hynotherapist asked me why I was crying and I said, "because I've lost her". I didn't feel that that was me any more. I wasn't the same happy little girl, I wasn't beautiful any more. The hypnotherapist told me that that's all blackheads were - a little bit of mud on your face. You are still beautiful. You are still you. You are still the same person. You've just forgotten.

Anyway I guess my point is that little things when you're small, have a huge effect on your self-image as an adult. So as a parent you need to tread carefully and make sure your children always feel beautiful. And that includes, as Dove point out, telling them that the women in adverts and magazines have been airbrushed and painted and that normal people have flaws and that those flaws are what make them unique and beautiful.

The most amazing dolls I've ever seen

Following a tip off from blog Yellowgoat I found these amazingly beautiful, dolls called "Enchanted Doll". They are posable and ball jointed but made of porcelain and polymer Clay. The girl who makes them is Marina Bychkova, a Russian born artist who trained in Canada. She says that her dolls are unique because she refuses to look at other dolls for inspiration. Instead she looks to the world of fairy tales. What interests her most is the 'implicit and often explicit violence that lies just beneath the surface of the magic'.

Find her website here: http://www.enchanteddoll.com

Here are a few of her costumed dolls. If only the makers of Barbie had such imagination. Just imagine what your childhood games would be like.






One of the dolls was recently auctioned off on ebay. Guess how much she made.....$40,000.00 US dollars!
http://cgi.ebay.ca/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=330390340731#ht_12564wt_1202

Antique jewellery Porn

I still have no engagement ring. Why? Because I am tempted not to get a diamond at all. Crazy mad I know. What girl would turn down a diamond? After all as Shirley says diamonds are forever, they won't leave in the night, have no fear that they might... No it's just that this is probably my only chance to get my hands on one of the gorgeous rings from the Tadema Gallery. This little shop in Camden has the most beautiful rings I have ever seen. Many of them featuring opals which seem so much more interesting than diamonds. Ok they don't wear well. They need nurturing and caring for - but isn't that a wonderful analogy for marriage. Care for your marriage as you care for your opal?

Here are some of the rings that make me go weak at the knees.