1. Howden’s Clock by May Miles Thomas

2. Candle Clock 5 by himynameiscat

3. Kenetic Sapphire Ring by Deborahmurdochdesigns

4. Cuckoo by JohannaBasford

5. Bird clock by Julia Smith Ceramics

//////////

See more of our Top 5 selections here.

I thought the spaces were well considered and professional; more gallery, less Art School. The graduates were all there, happy to talk about their work. Most importantly, there was a dedication to their craft, a sense of hundreds of hours spent passionately creating work which was both beautiful and technically outstanding. Right across the board from Graphics, to Textiles, Ceramics and Fine Art, I felt the Grays graduates weren’t trying to pull any stunts or cocky art tricks, they had put in the hours and made some truly outstanding work.

Call me old school, but I like that.

Some things that caught my eye:

Alex Gordon’s Thin K Gallery – a show within the show. 3 Graduates (a printer, a painter and a sculptor) got together and curated their own exhibition. Clever concept.

You couldn’t miss Tessa Androutsopoulos’ space. A colour explosion of Pandas in rockets and quirky monoprints, eccentricity and bravery combine to make a truly memorable show.

Having followed her final year endeavors on Twitter this year, I was delighted to see the fruits of Jo Dodd’s labour. Graphics graduate with the beautiful ability to move seamlessly from slick digital to tactile screen print.

The textile designer in me loved these huge painted canvases by Jason Murray. Precise, graphic works with painstaking attention to detail. A beautiful, coherent collection of work which I’ll be doing my very best to get into a show at Musa Aberdeen…

More details of the campaign here.

As one Aberdonian commented this morning on Twitter: “It’s disgusting. ACC sold our integrity, our reputation, our culture, our heritage, our green space and democracy yesterday.” (JackKeenan)

The general feeling in the City today is one of deep-set frustration and despair. The campaign to save UTG and the Peacock proposal has been high profile and bitterly fought in the North East for months now. The culmination of which was a £300,000 public enquiry (paid for by the tax payer) to discover what Aberdonian’s wanted the space to be used as.

Despite a majority being in favour of saving UTG, the council made the highly questionable vote of 20 to 7 in favour of Sir Ian Wood’s concrete tomb. 12 Councillors chose not to vote, a decision which is both disgusting and disgraceful considering the monumental impact of the outcome.

As the decision stands, the concrete will start flowing, our green space will be lost, our hopes for a cultural centre in the city will die and Aberdeen’s faith in democracy and our council has been shattered.

The mood in Aberdeen is one of despair and heartbreak.

Hidden Spaces – what do they mean and how do they affect us? Each person carries with them their own sense of home, tied to their sense of belonging, their past and their wished-of future. From this conception of home we construct the world around us – places we feel safe in, drawn to, wary of, excluded from and intrigued by.  Our idea of these places might change as we grow familiar with them, as personal and emotional associations fluctuate, as our bodies move through space and as others enter or leave that space – constructing spaces of migration, dislocation, settlement and even bereavement, each with conceptually structured layers of surface, accessibility and invisibility overlaying the physical construct of our environment.

With such a subjectively-framed starting point, not only will personal interpretations of hidden spaces vary, but these will be carried into the cultural and professional production of spaces, so an architect’s perception of Hidden Space might be very different from a public artist’s, an anarchist’s or a film location scout’s, and each of these professionals will in turn come to influence how we navigate the space around us.

From this broad and permeable conception of space we’ve drawn a few more concrete examples, and we’ll be featuring differing approaches to the theme of Hidden Spaces. From Curator to Artist to Poet, we’ve invited some guest bloggers to write about their relationships with spaces, here are some of the contributors we’ve got lined up to kick things off:

Matt Baker, in the past Lead Artist for both Inverness and the Gorbals, writing on hidden space from the perspective of someone who makes public art. Read his blogs: hiding, finding and the search, space hidden in things, looking for unconformity… & seasoning time.

Sarah Butler, author and head of the UrbanWords consultancy, developing projects which explore regeneration and place through creative writing. Read her blog here.

Richard Taylor, freelance artist & writer, talks about his collaboration on a project focused on abandoned spaces. Read his blogs: ArtEvict – hidden space and revealing performance, SPLICING HORRISONS, Hidden space – tent as a transitory studio, THE CUMBRIA ENERGY CENTRE & getting lost remaining hidden

Collaborative collective, Sans Facon, gave us a continued visual dairy of hidden spaces being enjoyed in everyday life. See their observations here.

We also had contributions from:
Arika – Shadowed Spaces
Johanna Basford – hidden (work) spaces
Neil McGuire – Hidden Spaces: Supreme Social Networks
Erin McElhinney – What’s in a name?
Susan Castillo – Hidden Space
Fraser Denholm – Tracing Places

Tell us about your hidden spaces - add a link to a blog, a video or photographs from the overlooked or concealed spaces of your city in the comments below.

[Brochure a collaboration by Lyall Bruce & Johanna Basford]

On Sat 6th Feb 2010, Censta and members went on Dundee Popup, a tour round the city’s creative people and places.  Artists, designers, illustrators, film-makers all gathered for a day of behind the scenes studio tours at Dundee Contemporary Arts, Duncan of Jordanstone and WASPS, private artist talks with Martin Boyce and Daziel and Scullion, plus an exclusive preview of the soon to be opened McManus Gallery after a 4 year refurbishment.

Members were blogging, tweeting and documenting in stills each part of the day, so you can take the tour for yourself.

As well as a day for members, and the city’s creatives to meet and discuss their work and practice, Dundee Popup created some LTD edition artworks. Censta members  SooperDD and Johanna Basford worked together to produce the booklet detailing the day, and Superfly worked with artists from the site to create a poster gallery round the city. Read more about it here.

To top it all off, we had an evening of talks from members, followed by wine and some rather fine Central Station cakes, created by Nikki McWilliams.

To see some of the photographs from the day look here. Read the rest of the blog to find out more about the day, and click here to find reviews and thoughts by the members who joined us.

///////////////

What? A tour of the creative world of Dundee, Central Station style. Private talks, tours and presentations. As well as lots of members meeting & discussing.

Where? Dundee

When? 11am – 8pm Saturday February 6th

///

[SuperFly poster by Jen Collins - part of a series]

11am:
Meet us at the Reception entrance of Duncan of Jordonson College of Art & Design. We’ll have a quick chat…and then the tour begins. Join us for some or all of it and come visit us at The Rep for a coffee stop.

11:30am options:
i) See the new exhibition at Cooper Gallery, Public Image, accompanied by a Curator talk & listen to sculptor student Julie Duffy talk about her practice

ii) Meet some graduates from DJCAD who’ll talk about how they’ve got themselves noticed since leaving

iii) Have a private tour of Dalziel + Scullion’s studio space

1pm options:
i) Go to Generator Projects for a private talk and tour

ii) Go to WASPS for a private studio tour

iii) Go to a screening of a film selected by Martin Boyce, with a live soundtrack by saxophonist Raymond MacDonald (please note there is a charge for this event & booking is necessary)

2pm options:
i) Get a rare private walkround of Realtime Worlds

ii) Have an exclusive peek inside the newly renovated McManus Galleries

3pm options:
i) Pop along to The Visual Research Centre

ii) Go to the DCA Print Studio for a private tour

3.45pm:
Hear an exclusive Martin Boyce talk about his No Reflections exhibition at the DCA

5pm options:
i) See the SuperFly Pop-up exhibition at the Hannah MacLure Centre

ii) Hear Yann Seznec talk about his Gelkies exhibition at the Hannah MacLure Centre

iii) Take a look at Handmade Heaven’s handmade wares at the Hannah MacLure Centre

6 – 8pm:
Join us for This is… Sit back and listen to a selection of our members giving quick-fire presentations about their work & practice. Then a chance to chat, mingle, drink and nibble

[Cupcakes by Nikki McWilliams]

Lyall Bruce and Johanna Basford have worked together over the last year on a couple of projects. Closest to home is the poster for Central Station Dundee Popup, which allowed them to develop on from a previous collaboration for NEoN (North East if North) in 2009.

They created both of the  works by passing the design between the two of them. Lyall, who is a graphic designer and sooperdd entity, always works digitally (he said he had attempted to include a pencil sketch he had made at the start of the project but was too embarrassed!). For the NEoN piece he started with the image of a wee guy in a hat slumped over and holding up a placard reading ‘The Future is Coming’ in the vector based imaging programme Illustrator, adding in tonal colour by ‘painting into the image in Photoshop’ using a graphics tablet.

Johanna is completely opposite in her process where she always works in a lo-fi and hand made way. Her artwork is characterised by intricate and decorative hand drawn patterns. Johanna showed the audience her drawings for both the projects which were drawn in black ink on thin white paper. She said that part of her process with Lyall had included balancing a pyrex dish on her knee with a lamp angled under it to make a d.i.y. light box so she could trace through parts of Lyall’s design to work around. Having said that, Johanna does use Photoshop to scan and clean up her drawings to use in different formats.

Lyall was in charge of combining the two images. Lyall was nervous about adding colour, (he had coveted amending Johanna’s drawing with marker pen for a while) but bravely went ahead and  brought a few points of colour into Johanna’s monochromatic design to tie it with his Photoshopped character.

For the Central Station leaflet they also included photographs of Dundee scenes and buildings, which Lyall overlaid with artworks, design and logos from the artists and organisers involved in the tour. Central station – photos from Dundee, then with members artwork hidden into the buildings. Yuck N Yum logo was on the train station, there was an illustrators artwork on the façade of the DCA. Kind of bringing what is going on behind closed doors out into the open… so fits well with the Popup tour idea!

/////

To find out what Dundee Popup was all about or to read more reviews & blogs  from the day, click here.

It’s already looking like a great day and a great turnout of people, but don’t fret if you can’t be here. Along with some of Censta’s members we’ll be blogging and tweeting the day. Watch out for blogs in the Dundee Popup group, follow @censta for tweets, tagged #dundeepopup and there will be photos uploaded by Ross_McLean all through the day and footage coming from Andy later in the week.

Posters by Superfly have been spotted all round the city, and the LTD edition booklets by SooperDD and Johanna Basford are already a coveted item.

The blogs as they come in…… and the tweets for the day.

And here’s the first blog … read all about Public Image at the Cooper Gallery @DCJAD.

Lots of people meeting, eating and blogging in between tours at the Censta hub at the Dundee Rep.

Emlyn Firth gives the lowdown on the DJCAD graduates showcase, including a live link up on Skype.

Our very own Suzy Glass gives her view of the Dalziel & Scullion studio tour.

Ever been inside the coveted doors of Realtime Worlds? Jon Carlos went along, what did he see?

Censta and members got a very special sneak preview of the soon to be re-opened and very much renovated McManus Gallery. Gillian Easson gives you an idea of what’s in store.

Heidi Proven disappeared into the Visual Research Centre at Dundee Contemporary Arts, and thinks you should too.

JonGill took in the DCA Print studio, screen printing, etching, block, lino and litho. Jessica Ashman gave us her account of the DCA Print Studio tour too.

Martin Boyce took members round his No Reflections instillation at the DCA, and explained the challenges of exhibiting the work in two different spaces. Here and at Venice Biennalle. Curator Donna HolfordLovell takes us through the talk.

Superfly has an obsession, find out what it is.

Artists and makers from Handmade Heaven, showed off their wares and Censta members a plenty bought things. See what Hellojenuine liked.

Then it was time for This is… at the Hannah Maclure Centre which went like this:
Yuck & Yum told us about the ways they distrubute art without using gallery spaces
Johanna Basford & Sooper DD entertained us with stories of collaboration
Arika went through their KYTN 2009 plans and how you can get involved
Genevieve Ryan & Jo Swingler talked us through recent illustration & creative writing collaboration
We heard and saw music & animation from Colliderscope‘s Fiona Soe Paing
Georgina Follett let us know about the V&A Dundee developments.

These were covered by Htothep, suzy.glass & DJCADExhibitions.

/////

To find out what Dundee Popup was all about or to read more reviews & blogs  from the day, click here.