Polly Gould at Danielle Arnaud Venice
Polly Gould at Danielle Arnaud Venice
Different Paths from Sky to Ground: The Sea Stories
16 April to 24 November 2024
Preview: Tuesday 16 to Sunday 21 April in presence of the artist.
Flexible timings including two open evenings on Friday 19 and Saturday 20 April, 6 to 9pm
Booking essential, please contact Danielle Arnaud at danielle@daniellearnaud.com
Different Paths from Sky to Ground: The Sea Stories
Yet the power of Nature cannot be shortened by the folly, nor her beauty altogether saddened by the misery, of man. The broad tides still ebb and flow brightly about the island of the dead, and the linked conclave of the Alps know no decline from their old pre-eminence, nor stoop from their golden thrones in the circle of the horizon. So lovely is the scene still, in spite of all its injuries, that we shall find ourselves drawn there again and again at evening out of the narrow canals and streets of the city, to watch the wreaths of the sea-mists weaving themselves like mourning veils around the mountains far away, and listen to the green waves as they fret and sigh along the cemetery shore.
John Ruskin, Stones of Venice, Vol 2, The Sea Stories, Murano, p.2, 1851-53.
The above quote from John Ruskin describes the mountains of the Alps as seen from Murano and was written between 1851-53 during the nineteenth century when the glass furnaces of Murano were the world centre of glass bead production. Women of Venice Known as impiraresse, worked as bead threaders to gather the beads into tradable and transportable strands. These glass beads were exported in great quantities across the globe as trading beads. Although production of seed beads ceased in Venice in the early 21st century they can still be bought from the remaining stocks in warehouses in Murano. The associated endangered skill of the impiraresse was recently recognised as an Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO. A similar reassessment of heritage knowledge can be seen in the work of architects and town planners who are now imagining the reinstatement of Venice's cisterns to address the future of water sustainability; having understood the structure of the built environment of Venice as an ancient rain harvesting system. In Ruskin's life and through his enthusiasms, the Alps are linked to Venice. Ruskin's The Stones of Venice: The Sea Stories explores and imagines all the multiple ways in which the history of Venice is connected to the sea. Glaciers such as his favourite Mer de Glace or Sea of Ice in the French Alps gave Ruskin scope to consider water in its frozen forms. In 1854, Ruskin made an early daguerreotype photo with John Hobbs in Chamonix, of the Mer de Glace in the Mont Blanc Massif. The frozen waters of this glacier have retreated significantly in the 170 years since Ruskin made his daguerreotype, which now serves as a document of the Anthropocene.
Extreme Environments
Architectural Association School of Architecture
The symposium spotlights the unique architecture, engineering and construction opportunities and challenges within extreme environments through a series of presentations and discussions by world leading experts. Four distinct environments frame the sessions of the symposium: Desert, Oceanic, Polar and Space. The challenges of extreme environments have allowed architects and engineers to envision novel and creative solutions with vast applicability, often converging through the theme of material and resource efficiency as a key pillar for sustainable development in extreme environments. The online symposium will be available virtually to participants globally and followed by a series of three-day design and technology workshops. the symposium and workshops are organized by the AA Visiting School Mars programme.
Organized by Kais Al-Rawi, Nerma Cridge, Xavier De Kestelier, in collaboration with the AA public programme.
Less a Building: Interactions with the London Zoo Aviary
A research project and publication by Michaela Nettell with: Marcela Aragüez, Tim Dee, Polly Gould, Alex Hartley, Julie F Hill, Helen Jukes, Milena Michalski, Colin Priest, Ana Ruepp and Matthew Turner
Design by Marit Münzberg
Publishing partner: Passengers
Launch event: Saturday 4 September 2021, 3-5pm with readings at 4 o'clock
Passengers, 110 Foundling Court, The Brunswick Centre (Entrance 3), Marchmont Street, London, WC1N 1AN
Readings from the launch will be broadcast via Passengers Instagram Live
Participation in workshop
Workshop by and with Fieldstations e.V.
07.07.2021 at 9 am daz — Deutsches Architektur Zentrum
The Anthropocene has in recent years become a field of reflexive intersection in which human activity and practices are being renegotiated. Architecture is one of the material fields that has a radical impact on the environment. This should lead the discipline to a radical rethinking not only with respect to its forms and materials but to the way it defines its pedagogical tasks. The workshop is an invitation to reflect together on the pedagogical capacities of architecture in practices of reflexivity, design, and building.
Contributors: Jane Rendell, Polly Gould, Peg Rawes, Jennifer Raum, Susanne Hauser, Philippa Nyakato Tumubweinee, Edward Denison, Riccardo Palma, Carlo RavagnatI, John Palmesino, Andrea Rossi, John Cook, Ben Pollock and Laura Nica.
The event is curated by Lidia Gasperoni of fieldstations. The association promotes research about the Anthropocene – the new geological age in which human activity has become one of the most dominant influences upon the transformational processes of the earth. The workshop, in cooperation with the Department of Architectural Theory at the Institute for Architecture at the TU Berlin, is part of the DAZ series “We need to talk!”.
Registration is requested by 5.7.2021 to Lidia Gasperoni:
lidia.gasperoni@tu-berlin.de
Ruskin’s Ecologies: Figures of Relation from Modern Painters to the Storm-Cloud
Edited by Kelly Freeman and Thomas Hughes
An open-access book of fourteen essays by established and emerging writers that reconsider John Ruskin’s (1819–1900) teachings on art and architecture, his drawings, and scientific investigations—and the relations between such practices—in light of contemporary planetary concerns such as the life of things, conservation, and the role of art and imagination in negotiating human and other-than-human relations in an ever-imperiled world.
Essays by: Stephen Bann, Timothy Chandler, Kate Flint, Kelly Freeman, Lawrence Gasquet, Polly Gould, Thomas Hughes, Stephen Kite, Jeremy Melius, Ryan Roark, Nicholas Robbins, Courtney Skipton Long, Moran Sheleg, Giulia Weston.
On Site-Writing VIRTUAL IAS Festival
9:30 -11:00 AM 05 May 2021
On Site-Writing, presentations by Professor Jane Rendell and Dr Polly Gould followed by discussion.
Jane Rendell and Polly Gould will discuss the practice of site-writing from pedagogical and research perspectives. Jane will present 'Selvedges,' to be published in the Slow Spatial Reader (ed Carolyn F Strauss and https://site-readingwritingquarterly.co.uk/ and Polly will present her new book Antarctica, Art and Archive, published by Bloomsbury, and Refracted Sites (cargo.site)
This talk forms part of the IAS fifth anniversary festival on the theme of ‘Alternative Epistemologies’
Site-Reading Writing Quarterly
March 2021
This spring equinox I was fortunate to be invited to participate in Jane Rendell’s creative take on the practice of writing reviews. I was paired with the architectural historian Paulette Singley and we undertook Jane’s inviation to ‘write a sitatued reivew’ of each other’s work.
Paulette Singley reads Polly Gould’s Antarctica, Art, and Archive (Bloomsbury: 2020)
Polly Gould reads Paulette Singley’s How to Read Architecture (Routledge: 2019)
Refracted Sites
16th October 2020 launch
See the exhibition of Site-writing works by this year’s participants in the Site-writing module that I am proud to have been supporting in my role as tutor. Launched on Friday 16 October 2020
Place in Time
20th October 2020 6 - 7:30pm
I participated in this online Zoom panel. To mark International Landscape Day, GroundWork Gallery brings together contributors to Place in Time: the Work of Tim Simmons, published earlier this year, to discuss our changing relationship to landscape and place. To mark International Landscape Day, GroundWork Gallery brings together contributors to Place in Time: the Work of Tim Simmons, published earlier this year, to discuss our changing relationship to landscape and place.
What happens when our ability to engage with places is restricted to our immediate locality?
What do we lose or gain when we engage with landscape through digital means?
How do we mourn the places that have become inaccessible or use our imagination to recreate them?
What impact does all of this have upon our ability to make work?. I am one of the participants speaking. Join the panel Tim Simmons (artist), Camilla Brown (curator & writer), Polly Gould (artist), Tim Holt-Wilson (writer), Veronica Sekules (curator & writer) and Judith Stewart (artist & writer) to discuss these and other issues at this Zoom event.
The Transformational Practices Lecture Series at Aarhus School of Architecture
Friday 6th November at 1pm
I have been invited to give a lecture on the The Transformational Practices Lecture Series organised by the Critical Written Reflection Programme at Aarhus School of Architecture, DK. This will be an onine event recorded for the academic audience at Aarhus School of Architecture.