Tutt Tutt is the alter ego of Lincolnshire based illustrator Sonia C Whitehead who works in graphics, publishing and print.

What’s in the blog:
Tutt Tutt’s blog is a mix of documentation of works, as well as posts about her current Degree Show.

Why we like it:
As well as pleasing patterns, we like that Tutt Tutt’s blog is really all about her work. Tutt Tutt is new to blogging and sees it as a “virtual journey.” We hope she continues on this journey as we sure do like seeing her work.

Hidden treasure:
Tucked away in one of her posts, Tutt Tutt’s illustration for children’s book Alice in Wonderland is so good, we just had to share it:

Where to find out more:
Read Tutt Tutt’s blog here.
Follow Tutt Tutt on Twitter.
Like Tutt Tutt on Facebook.

/////

Want to take a look at more suggested blogs by artists? Look here.

Aside from the willingness with which most graduating students accept the de-facto format of ‘degree show’, it surprises me that every year at degree show time, the generalisations that people seem to make about the types of courses offered by art and design institutions get writ large in a strange dividing up of ‘typography’ from ‘ideas’, or ‘concepts’ from ‘craft.’ This chat can become a bit depressing, bar the fact that its hopefully only a few people indulging in it, but it does highlight one particular tension, about ‘what industry wants’, (as some of those in ‘industry’ have a habit of phrasing it).

Of course education and industry (in the broadest sense) should be in close contact and part of a dialogue (also including other external patrons and users of design who are not ‘businesses’) which is mutually beneficial, but the idea that Art Schools and Design Courses would be better off shaping their courses solely to the needs of business would be a massive error, and indicative of a think-big-but-ignore-the-detail type of strategic initiative for which governments, skill-councils and other quango’s are renowned.

Scotland is a small nation, with even smaller art and design courses, and the fact that there is some diversity in the types of course on offer is a massive bonus, and one that students can take advantage of. We are also in the massively beneficial position of being able to offer cohort sizes and staff/student ratios that would make a London student weep with envy. But we need to beware that we’re possibly at the thin end of a very thick wedge (given the recent budget) and its not going to be easy for small specialist institutions to stay small or specialist in the future. It strikes me as strange that when mergers are discussed for Scotland’s remaining independent art schools, its always with the nearest big university and never with each other.


The sinisterly titled D&AD ‘New Blood‘ show, part of the (surely ironicly titled) ‘free-range‘ graduate event (battery farm or zero-grazing anyone?) is a very visual demonstration of just how many creative graduates leave UK courses every year, and how highly many graduates from Scottish courses feature amongst them**, surely an affirmation of the scale and types of courses we can (currently) manage to run. These events (at their worst) are also indicative of the direction art and design education could head if we follow the idea that design courses should be focussed solely on churning out industry-ready and compliant machines. At risk of making a massive historical generalisation, the supposed glory-days of British graphic design, from Fletcher through to Brody and Saville et al. came on the back of a fairly archaic and/or anarchic art-school style education. That we have such strong small courses with their own characteristics, is something to build on, not something to ‘iron-out’.

So the ECA show, (particularly Graphic Design and Illustration as that’s where I spent most time), for me demonstrated (in the same way that GSA, DoJ, Grays and some of the other Scottish university degree courses do) a reassuring view of the design landscape in this north-west corner of Europe. The things that excited me most were the projects (like this CCTV one, by Piotr Klarowski) where students had challenged the visual protocol, tried to find a new angle into a topic, and allowed their time at university (and the freedoms afforded) to produce ideas that might not currently sit very comfortably in the grafik (sic) mainstream. But that’s a reflection of my personal tastes and interests, and, (while I’m convinced it’s those students that will make the most interesting designers, advertisers, filmmakers, artists and so on), I’m equally glad of the students who have produced more mainstream and archetypal work, but executed it with a depth and rigour, as it suggests a course (and design community?) where people with these interests and ideas can feed off each other, challenge each other, and the binary thinking that lurks around the corner can be held at bay for another year.

[I've used some shots of the eca show to illustrate this post, and tried to credit them below — any errors I apologise for, and please let me know, so they can be corrected].
Images, in order of appearance:
Signage
Recycling Centre outside Main Building
Main Hall, Textiles Product Design and Others
Val McLean, Intermedia Art
Stefania Strouza, Art Space and Nature MFA
Graphic Design Entrance
Piotr Klarowski, Graphic Design, CCTV Project
Assorted Business Cards
*Thanks to DC and KD for the lend of this turn of phrase.
**Though we’d do better to look at the international context rather than the national and work out whether we’re any good or not.

Lale Arikoglu’s installation combined found images and footage with her own photographs; framed work with loose sheets and Post-its; tiny, meticulous ink drawings of natural forms with handwritten and printed matter; and elements that could have been works in their own right with ones that, removed from the installation, might simply have been research.  Modes of doubling, recurrence of subjects and materials, and cross-referencing across the body of works tied them all together with a delicate balance that commanded the viewer’s scrutiny a second time, in a manner reminiscent of the Icelandic conceptual artist Hreinn Fridfinnsson.

In a similar vein, Lisa-Marie Reynolds’ work on negative body image combined drawings, ceramic body casts, and other text works in a skilful, coherent way that allowed her to incorporate very slight, lo-fi pieces without them paling into insignificance, such as a wall-mounted, finger-sized piece of glass with a crack in it, bearing the label ‘No fingertips.’

Another photographer, Thomas Horák, ventured further into the 3-D realm, with a great assortment of objects including motorised ferrets, end-to-end pint glasses containing confetti, bunches of nails soldered together, a film playing on a TV monitor, and an electric motor which provided a constant hum.  With an almost too numerous and wide-ranging collection of scientific and domestic items, and small motorised furry things flying around, it had the feel of an interactive science museum, but without the interactive element.  Inspection of the list of titles proved enlightening, but also limited some of the works to one-liners. 

Horák did, however, negotiate his awkward corner space by leaving a circle of the floor unpainted and arranging his works around it.  As ever, appraising the show meant having one’s judgement coloured by how well the artists had managed the lack of space, before one even began to assess the work.

This being so, one might expect the large-scale sculptures to be at a particular disadvantage, and indeed they were.  Susanna Olczak, Naomi Bell, and Tim Pulleyn were three who showed impressive execution and attention to finish in their formalist structures, but clearly could have benefited from a little extra space.  In the Mackintosh Gallery, Bell’s sleek black lines referenced the architecture of the building, and also literally reflected it in the Perspex sheets on the floor; thus, although the viewer may not have been able to step back to apprehend the piece fully, her mental image was filled in by peering directly over the base to see the reflection of wooden beams looming overhead.

Lyndsey Wardrop’s wall intervention showed a lovely, sensitive engagement with the fabric of the building: blue-grey metal slats had been inserted into the wall like an oversized air vent, and the crumbling, imperfect texture of the surround resonated with that of, well, the artschool.

As with the sculpture, the most interesting of the Painting and Printmaking works had gone for big and bold, and were a welcome antidote to the dense, involved, studies of gothic subjects that seem to be recycled year after year.  Shaun O’Donnell’s twisted, fleshy humanoid lumps stood out vividly against surreal, brightly coloured wastelands, although some of the most interesting of these, depicting the fleshy forms interfacing with foreign objects, were stacked to one side on the floor.  Solveig Settemsdal’s works similarly stood out for their bold, luscious, impressionistic style. 

In a different strain entirely, Tilde Engstrøm’s brilliant existentialist portraits of faintly absurd characters seemed at first glance to belong in the realm of witty caricatures in a Sunday paper supplement.  In fact, they covered conceptual as well as aesthetic bases, the texts and quotes accompanying the drawings designed to manipulate a predictable response in the viewers, and to purposefully distance them from the subjects so they remain “consciously critical observers.”

Two works that rendered this impossible were Paul McDonald’s affecting but humorous exploration of living with disabilities associated with thalidomide, and Gitte Hansen’s absorbing photographs, which deservedly won the Alice Duncan prize.  After watching Hansen’s film of two young goats head butting each other for longer than I care to admit, I concluded that the better new work by this year’s graduates was definitely to be found among the Photography department.

The Degree Show runs from 12 – 19 June 2010.

Since around 2005 Degrees unedited with http://www.a-n.co.uk has been supporting the critical context of degree show season through a platform for review as well as one of the first blogging communities to hit the web, designed especially for the student voice. We have students stretching their virtual thoughts from all over the UK and beyond so, talking of diversification… there’s voices from universities and colleges in London, Wales, Devon, the midlands reaching up to Northern England into Scotland.

This group on Central Station is great, it’s pulling in so much more interest! Degrees unedited (i.e.Richard Taylor) is happy therefore and would like to say thank you to the drive of Central Station!!!

If any more of you are visiting degree shows make sure you get on Twitter and either use #degreeshows hash tag or #degreeshow hash tag to recommend your pick of student work. a-n Magazine is pulling from your interest to get a student image on the cover or featured in the summer issue…

Introducing a social media strategy is an easy win for arts marketeers. Do away with print – save time, hassle and the environment, with the added bonus of being the revolutionary who drags everyone into the 21st Century.

In theory, it sounds great. As black and white as a halftone dot. Except this whole trade-off between design and print, and social media, is a bit of a misnomer. But let’s compare them for a moment:

Print has been around for a long, long time. For the sake of argument lets pick out a landmark year – 1450 – when Gutenburg started getting his fingers inky doing some nice brochures for the Lord. That’s 560 years. Twitter? 4 years. [I’m aware social media was around a bit before that, but then I’m not counting back to The Dead Sea Scrolls, God’s innovative but ill-fated roll-folded direct marketing campaign].

Right now there’s a lot of ‘what’s next?’ questions and prophesizing, and Web 3.0 chin stroking, but no-one really knows for sure where this is all heading. We can see some platforms are already dying (Bebo is the latest casualty, MySpace a hollow Murdoch shell of it’s innovative heyday). Point being, just because this new stuff is great – and we should all embrace it – we shouldn’t chuck out all the brilliant old stuff. So, here’s my 4 part plea to the design/print naysayers…
First off, adopting Social Media shouldn’t be about giving design a bodyswerve. Effective social media marketing is designed – it’s a nuanced combination of images and text just like anything you put on paper, and needs to be considered in the same way.

Secondly, Social Media shouldn’t be thought of as a cheap alternative to design for print – if anything social media takes more time – once you’ve created something it’s only the beginning of a journey that requires constant feeding, monitoring and interaction.

Third, if we’re talking solely about arts marketing, then surely we’re still appealing at core to a visual culture that places intricates values on form, content and aesthetics? Rather than killing off printed material, social media essentially presents an opportunity to focus on making smaller runs of better print. As a designer I take little joy in squeezing on more and more information that could be communicated on a website, or sending out large runs of cheap, digitally printed flyers. I’m a fully paid-up stock sniffing, type fetishising, paper grammage nerd, so I’m biased… but when you are communicating something as potentially complex as artists’s work, combined with the values of a gallery, isn’t it worth the effort to attempt to represent that properly?

Most importantly, design and print is a hugely important part of visual culture, and works in tandem with visual art. A great example of this is Neil McGuire’s piece I wrote about a few weeks ago that was produced for the ECA Masters show and in itself became part of the exhibition.

There must be more examples, and better arguments. Am I preaching to the converted, or is print pulped?

Image: Invite for Baldvin Ringsted, +44 141 Gallery by The Press – Emlyn Firth/Edwin Pickstone 

Its nearly degree show time at GSA, which is exciting. Opens 10th/11th June (Please note: tickets required for entry), then open-access for the following week.

image: lizzie malcolm, work in progress. vis com 2010