Shell Museum of Design & Decomposition

Projects and Ideas

Plans are underway to re-form the World’s only Shell Museum of Design and Decomposition, first open to the public in 1978 at Aber Gwen Mill, Pencader, Wales.

For over Five Hundred Million Years, Nature’s design on Earth was one of Permacycle – gathering in the energy from the Sun to feed and evolve life.  Although we are one of the results of that long history, we have gone against its grain by inventing un-natural pollutants and very hard to recycle materials.

As we become more and more aware of the many problems we create for the Natural World, and ourselves, we look more closely at how Nature kept balance in our absence to see if we can learn how to help Nature recover and in turn, extend our life on Earth. There is nothing to say we will achieve this but there’s every possibility that we might.

The Shell Museum of Design and Decomposition displays working examples of Nature’s Permacycle alongside Nature’s wonders of design through evolution.

We’re always looking to collaborate with those who are working to secure a perpetual future.

Background to the Museum:

Only Fools and Humans think that the Earth can survive forever without changing our ways and FAST
Posted by Grant.

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Pop-up Museum of Shape & Form

Gallery

“Vanishing points and delineation lines, like lake ripples from stone skippings, will one day be rendered unseen by nature’s overtaking green.”  (Grant)

The work of Grant grows within a seasonally changing landscape of trees, rivers and pathways.  As a designer, Grant shapes the new, which is subject to manufacturing requirements, materials, space, time, perception, costs,  future trends  and the art of balancing consumer demands with those of business growers. But as an artist, Grant creates works of infinite variation in purely pictorial space.

“To design is  to plan and to organize, to order, to relate and to control. In short it embraces all means opposing disorder and accident. Therefore it signifies a human need and qualifies man’s thinking and doing”  (Josef Albers)

Grant’s model of the Earth is layered chance. “Life tries to re-order slime”, he wrote in a school art essay.

It is interesting that whilst Grant enjoys working on projects that have clear structure and set frames of reference, he delights in shifting his eye to the open space between lines where so much more can be shared by teasing the eye and rippling the mind.

Further reading:

Josef Albers / Despite Straight Lines ‘An analysis of his graphic constructions by Francois Bucher’. [Pub. Yale University Press. 1961]

Vasarely. Plastic Arts of the 20th Century. Collection Ed. Marcel Joray [Pub Editions du Griffon Neuchatel, 1969)

(Hats off to Vasarely and Albers – from the Pop-up Museum of Shape & Form)
(Handworn, dented, creased doing tools – from the Pop-up Museum of Shape & Form)

 

 

 

 

Posted by Grant.

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