Architect James Law’s plans to build the impressive Mumbai Cybertecture Egg office block would seem to owe a little to the more modest live/ work space of the Exbury Egg. My approximate 10 sq metres of floor space (including mezzanine for sleeping) is a bit dwarfed by Mumbai’s fourteen floors (three below ground) with around 10,000 sq metres per floor and extending to a height of 62 metres. Like the Exbury Egg though, it’s is designed to be ‘lean and green’ and plans include solar photovoltaic panels, rooftop wind turbines, an elevated garden and a grey water filtration system—while the tilt of the structure is calculated to increase its solar energy gain. Importantly, both The Exbury Egg and the Cybertercture Egg embody the source of all life in the implicit meaning of their form. Perhaps the Exbury Egg will pay a visit when they are ready for their launch….

The Eggman returns to Finsley Gate Wharf in Burnley on Sunday 9th September.

I found Graham Sutherland's egg when visiting the superb exhibition'Journeys with The Wasteland' at Turner Contemporary in Margate. His drawing illustrates the words from Eliot's poem of its title. Sutherland's fractured symbol of new life and nurture shows the head of a bird peeking out onto an arid, spiritual wasteland. It's a petrified rock of an egg.

Our undeclared war on nature, symbolised by plastic waste across every continent and sea, is our own particular legacy for the future. Egglet (PP)  V, is one of a series made from polypropylene rope, found discarded on Hastings Stade during a residency @JerwoodGallery for the exhibition @everythingcomesfromtheegg last year.

Wishing all followers of the Exbury Egg a most happy Christmas and joyful new year.

The exhibition closed at Jerwood Gallery on October 15th and this is a short video record of the gallery installation that complemented the Exbury Egg itself, so prominent outside. Full details of the tour can be found at www.everythingcomesfromtheegg.com

 

 

Net lofts and some boats along the Stade offer a reminder that timber was traditionally preserved using pine tar. Nowadays it is often substituted by paints and varnishes cheaper to produce than the £20 a litre of the genuine Stockholm pine tar product.

Hastings Hue No. 11

 

 

Hastings Hue No 10 is a sappy coloured green

Rubbed, buffed, scuffed and scraffitoed

A calendar of  life on the shingle beach.

The score of time and place.

 

Last year when the Exbury Egg was at Finsley Gate Boatyard in Burnley Wood, I was artist in residence at this derelict boatyard site and this little video by Huckleberry Films was commissioned by Super Slow Way.   As the ‘care taker’,  I simply opened the space up to share my own enjoyment of nature (from a wintry April until the first snows of Winter) with a great many local people.

As the tour ‘Everything Comes from the Egg’ draws to a close at the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings on Sunday October 15th, its good to look back on such happy memories.

Dead dogfish, huss and skate were strewn over the foreshore at Hastings Stade. I was told the gulls ignored them, but today they were being enthusiastically fought over.

Polypropylene (PP) rope is very popular in marine use because it floats, is cheap to produce and is relatively strong and rot resistant. Not the strongest of rope, it is also sensitive to UV degradation that means it can become brittle and weak if left out in the sun. On the foreshore around the Hastings Stade I was able to gather a range of frayed and vary coloured threads.

However, this well managed area is encouragingly largely free of such detritus and my collection took a few hours to gather. I am making it into an ironic sort of Hastings Egglet that acts as a reminder of wider issues around plastic contamination of the seas.