Natural History Museum

Posted on March 10, 2013 by waiyukkennedy

The animal and plant decoration on the museum’s exterior

I have posted before about my love for the Waterhouse Building, home of London’s Natural History Museum (The Sculpture of Nature). This time I thought that I would share a few photographs showing the outside of this beautiful and eccentric building, specifically, a few of the many, many animal and plant sculptures and reliefs that decorate its rich exterior.

A Cathedral to Science – entrance to the museum

The ambition of Alfred Waterhouse’s design is breathtaking in its complexity, with literally hundreds of sculptures and gargoyles adorning a façade that is already a busy excursion into the Gothic fairytale-land of the German Romanesque. Such richness of detail could easily have disintegrated into a jumbled mess, yet through careful control of scale and proportion, together with the cohesive force of the strong lines running through the design, Waterhouse never loses the overall coherence of the building.

Iconic landmark – The towers of the museum seen from South Kensington underground station

Primitive reptiles and a dire-wolf? beneath on of the many windows

Primitive reptiles and a dire-wolf? beneath one of the many windows

This magnificent feline is high up, against one of the building’s central towers

A whole menagerie of beasts and gargoyles look down on visitors

This lion, like all the other beasts, was modelled from Waterhouse’s own drawings

The building also has more subtle decoration, such as this fox and birds over the entrance

Smaller creatures are represented on tiles such as these

Apart from the animal in the roundel, note the birds in the rooftop ironwork

The famous pterodactyl

I fell in love with this building on the day I first saw it and in the decades since I have only grown to appreciate it more. If you have a chance to visit London then please make a trip to the Natural History Museum one of your priorities.

(As always, thanks are due to husband Alex for helping to put my thoughts into words.)

Crackington: Textile Relief

Posted on June 8, 2012 by waiyukkennedy

I created this textile relief a few years ago, when I was working on a series of reliefs that were inspired by the cliffs and rocks of Cornwall.

The bigger scale of a wall relief provides a great opportunity to play with colour, as there is a much wider surface area to work with than there is with smaller jewellery pieces.
The relief was made as one single piece of fabric, which was then stitched into shape and embellished.

I’m planning on shifting it onto a more interesting background that will provide more of a sense of connection and interplay, haven’t gotten around to it yet though!

I’m particularly fond of the detail shots I took of this piece, so I’ve included quite a few for you to browse – enjoy!

: “Crackington” – Textile relief

Textile Art: Dragon

Posted on April 16, 2012 by waiyukkennedy

A little while back I took part in the Cornwall Crafts summer show at Trelowarren. I wanted to create a much bigger textile relief than any I had previously designed, and the result was Dragon. A bigger piece meant a lot of different challenges; there were difficulties that were never an issue for smaller pieces, particularly how to keep such a large surface interesting whilst maintaining a sense of unity of form.

Designing the Template
I began by cutting smaller scale paper templates in order to explore different shapes. The relief was cut from one piece, then shaped and stitched into a three-dimensional form. I cut out a template from fabric of roughly the same stiffness and flexibility to my own fabric to confirm that the design would work.

Making the Fabric
I used the same techniques as on the smaller pieces, but much more attention was needed to make sure that the entire surface flowed together. Different parts of the dragon were shaded in bronzes and golds, and white was used as a highlight. Alex cut brass tubing into lengths, which were added to provide contrast and structure.

Framing the Dragon
I wanted the background to be an integrated part of the design, and so rather than use a plain colour fabric, I used Japanese shibori techniques with indigo dye on silk. The silk panels were mounted over canvas onto wooden frames, and then finally the dragon was hand-stitched onto the silk.