After the success of their previous student sponsored project Penguin Books collaborated with us again this year by celebrating the launch of the new Penguin Modern series. Fine Art and Sculpture students from Chelsea and Camberwell Colleges of Arts were invited to submit design proposals for art installations for the windows of Foyles’ flagship store on Charing Cross Road.
From the entries, four students were selected to create their designs made from Penguin Modern books, inspired by the pioneering spirit of the series. The installation was unveiled to coincide with the publication of the Penguin Modern series and was on display for two weeks. Elements of the installation are now on display in the Business and Innovation exhibition cabinet in the main reception of Chelsea College of Arts.
Four students from UAL created installations constructed out of Penguin Modern books and inspired by the pioneering spirit of the series. The installations were unveiled at Foyles Charing Cross Road to coincide with the publication of the Penguin Modern series and were on display for two weeks. Midori Arai and Julia Angulo from Chelsea’s Graduate Diploma Fine Art course were two of the four winners.
Penguin Modern is a new series of 50 small-format books for £1 each that celebrate the spirit and diversity of 20th century literature. The series will introduce readers to radical writers who broke the rules and made their voices heard against the odds, including Kathy Acker, Martin Luther King, Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Andy Warhol, and Susan Sontag.
The Evening Standard reported that Midori Arai work “explores the idea of books as a meeting place, with a sculpture created from folded pages in the style of Japanese wishing plaques and fortune-telling strips” and that “Julia Angulo’s design is made of deconstructed books, in order to explore the physical parts that make up a book itself.”
Midori speaks in the film about how she made an “experience to connect with people, the book and the bookshop”… “tied like the Japanese fortune of paper.”
Julia has come from an undergraduate in Graphic Design to study Graduate Diploma Fine Art at Chelsea and has “questioned the difference between a regular book and an artist book; the typography, the distance between lines, the size of the pages, the paper; this piece is to show how a book can also be a piece of art.” Julia “started the series back in Brazil; buying cheap books, ripping them and trying everything… and then I got into this, so my best advice is to just try”
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