Tripping the light fantastic at IFOG 2019

Over the past week we’ve been visiting the Ruskin Glass Centre in Stourbridge for the Biennale International Festival of Glass 2019 and it’s been inspiration (and invention) all the way!

On Sunday we attended the “Pretty Useful” with @ChloeUden and @Naomioutdoors solar art workshop where we spent the day exploring solar panels as potential for artworks that generate energy to power your phone or usb devices! Yes, making solar panels both pretty and useful! The photo above is of my finished picture, loosely based on lotus seed heads but with a distinctly pop art cellular design! It’s slightly reminiscent of the spinning painting toy I had as a child where you squirted liquid colours onto a swiftly revolving piece of card on a turntable to create splash pictures! (And a lot of brown paint when all the colours collided!) Thankfully, I managed to avoid the slub brown and come away with a fully functioning boldly solar-art-charger! Fabulous! Thank you to Chloe and Naomi for a brilliant introduction to this arts, science and technology development, we hope to see much more of this thinking outside the art and energy box in future! See www.artandenergy.org for more details and forthcoming workshops!