Matt Grabham – Blue Plaque Fiddler

October 2, 2014October 2, 2014albanlow Tags: Art language location, Blue Plaque, Blue Plaque Walk, Cambridge, Cambridge blue plaque, cambridge blue plaque walk, matt grabham Leave a comment

In preparation for our Cambridge Blue Plaque Walk at this year’s Art Language Location exhibition we will be celebrating some of our nominees. They have all been preserved in blue plaque glory and will be placed on the streets during our walk on the 18th October 2014.

One of my favourite plaques for this exhibition is for Matt Grabham. Although you may not have seen Matt you may well have heard him as you walk through central London and beyond. Once upon a time, I believe he was a nurse, a swashbuckling carer for all our needs and he still fights for the NHS cause, attending marches and protests.

Matt Grabham at Twickfolk 2012

As a musician of some aplomb you might think he would be most at home in a concert venue or recording studio but you’re more than likely to hear him outside Waterstones in Notting Hill Gate or inside the belly of London’s tube network. It is the encounters he endures and sometimes recounts that are worth hearing as much as his music. Read his blog A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Busk that Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld to gain access to a world where people make sweeping assumptions just because you choose to play music in a public place.

Matt Grabham

It is with regret that I have only seen Matt Grabham twice in full flow. The first was playing violin at Twickfolk in Twickenham two years ago while I was artist-in-residence at the venue. The second time was in a heavily trafficked underground tunnel. The verve and passion that he gave to his performance was more impressive than that I have seen at any conventional music venue. Follow Matt on Twitter @montmarcey to get the full flavour of what it’s like on the busking circuit. Alternatively catch him with Baroque Folk Noir quartet Firefay and see/hear what he sounds like amongst fellow (talented) musicians.

Join us on the Cambridge Blue Plaque Walk by meeting outside Cambridge Rail Station, 10.30am on 18th October 2014. There will be Free maps or buy one for £2
Please visit the Art Language Location website where you find plenty more text based art around the city. – http://artlanguagelocation.wordpress.com/

Alban Low

Natasha Day – Blue Plaque Cambridge

September 29, 2014September 29, 2014albanlow Tags: Art language location, artist, artists walks, Cambridge, Cambridge blue plaque, cambridge blue plaque walk, Natasha Day Leave a comment

Until recently Natasha Day was a local artist who worked (and taught courses) in Ely but many of us know her as the eternal traveller who paints global landscapes and photographs her voyages for us all to experience.

Natasha Day (Courtesy of http://www.facebook.com/natashaday100)

I have personally been following her work since she exhibited on the Sussex seafront for the Brighton Open exhibition in 2011. Although this was on a miniature scale her strong and colourful abstracts immediately took the eye. It is no surprise that she has taken inspiration from her time living in Australia.

It is not all about vivid colours and hot climes though! I was lucky enough to edit Sampson Low’s very own book of one-page stories, FreedBook (2013), which included not only a photograph but a poem too from a typical Day expedition in Iceland.

Since then she has spent two weeks in Iceland on an Artist Residency. She was faced with bold but elusive mountains, pale lights and violent weather changes that enabled her to embrace a freer, chaotic, approach with a tempered end result. Never one to sit still she has recently moved to Norwich and we are awaiting the first crop of magical paintings to burst forth from her studio.

Natasha Day – Emergence

“It has taken me years to evolve into the artist that I am today. Through many courses, styles, approaches and experimentation with different media, I’m sure I will keep on learning and changing as I paint and teach, which is one of creativities great joys, you never stop evolving if you are alive.” Natasha Day explains.

Alban Low

Dom O’Reilly – Blue Plaque Cambridge

September 26, 2014September 26, 2014albanlow Tags: afganistan cricket, Art language location, Cambridge, Cambridge blue plaque, cambridge blue plaque walk, dom o'reilly, smartwalks Leave a comment

Dom O’Reilly is one of our most popular nominees who like many of the people who are celebrated in our Blue Plaques has both a good sense of humour and an interesting life story.

Dom started his career as a journalist on the New Milton Advertiser and Lymington Times in Hampshire before reaching shores further afield with the Prague Post. He was the Senior Reporter and Sports Editor on The European newspaper during Andrew Neil’s reign, the man we now know as the presenter of BBC2’s politic broadcasts with the shredded wheat hair.

Dom O’Reilly

Sport and Foreign expeditions have been the reoccurring themes in Dom O’Reilly’s life and career. His time as UK Director at Afganaid not only gave him the chance to make a considerable difference to the people of Afganistan but also the development of its cricket team. One of his proudest moments was to see the Afghanistan cricket team achieve ODI status.

“Those of us who work in and for Afghanistan know there is much more to the country than the fighting we see on news bulletins and the cricketers have demonstrated that. While cricket is currently a minority sport in Afghanistan, I’m sure the team’s success will boost interest and give everyone there a lift,” Dom told ESPN in 2009. “It’s a great achievement by the Afghan cricket team to qualify for ODI status with such scant resources and shows the determination and resourcefulness of the people.”

I met Dom O’Reilly for the first and last time as part of a unusual art project in 2011 with the rambling art collective SMartwalks. Back then we would find poignant, interesting and funny tweets from local residents and print them onto magnets. By taking them from the ephemeral world of twitter and posting them back into the physical realm, we were trying to explore the concepts of community, privacy and sometimes idiocy on our part. On the 26th November 2011 we walked a 5 mile high L (we subsequently walked ONDON too ) across London from Harrow to Gunnersbury. We were lucky enough to encounter one of our tweeters, Dom O’Reilly, in Gunnersbury Park. Hats off to him, no one else had been brave enough to track us down as we walked across the capital that year.

Since then he has become Director of Communications at UWC International and luckily doesn’t wander around parks meeting rambling men. His plaque though tells it own story, one I’m looking forward to hearing if I ever meet the great man again.

Alban Low

Jane Salvage – Blue Plaque Cambridge

September 25, 2014September 25, 2014albanlow Tags: Art language location, artists walks, Cambridge, Cambridge blue plaque, cambridge blue plaque walk, Jane salvage Leave a comment

Jane Salvage Plaque

Jane Salvage is known worldwide for her leadership in nursing and healthcare development, and for her widely read publications. She has held senior posts with the Prime Minister’s Commission on the Future of Nursing and Midwifery in England, the Willis Commission on Nursing Education, the World Health Organization (WHO), Nursing Times magazine, the King’s Fund and elsewhere.

Jane Salvage 2014

Her main focus at the moment is an international health project in Mongolia. Closer to home she is Writer in Residence at the School of Nursing, Kingston University where I have had the pleasure of rubbing shoulders with her. This blue plaque isn’t her first honour of course, she was voted the sixth most influential nurse of the last 60 years in 2008 by the Nursing Times! Blue used to be her colour too. In her youth she was a supporter of Brighton and Hove Albion but switched allegiances to the Arsenal in 1996.

This is the description that accompanied Jane Salvage’s nomination when it landed in my inbox….
“There is a crossroads near Magdalene Bridge where, one midnight, a drunken student in a long boho skirt that got tangled up in the chain, fell off her bike and lay on the ground laughing hysterically.”

AL.

Cambridge Blue Plaque Walk

September 18, 2014March 6, 2017albanlow Tags: alban low, Art language location, artists walks, Blue Plaque, Blue Plaque Walk, Cambridge, Cambridge blue plaque, cambridge blue plaque walk, Map, robert good, walk 4 Comments

Fold out Cambridge Blue Plaque Map

Cambridge Blue Plaque Walk
Colour Map and Spotters Guide

Published September 2014
ISBN 978-0-9534712-8-7
A3 fold out map
Author – Alban Low, Harvey Wells, Robert Good
Editor – Natalie Low
SLB0007

BUY Cambridge Blue Plaque Walk – £2 (+£1.20 P&P to UK address)

The Cambridge Blue Plaque Walk is a two hour circular walk that visits 21 of Cambridge’s Blue Plaques celebrating famous names like John Maynard Keynes and Sir Jack Hobbs and notable achievements such as the discovery of DNA.

The full colour map highlights the route but allows you to wander off at any point and re-join the trail. There is also a spotter’s guide, to keep children and the eagle-eyed amongst you entertained throughout your journey.

This walk was originally created as part of the Art Language Location festival in 2014 by artist Alban Low. Alongside the 21 established Blue Plaques, Low invited nominations for everyday plaques that celebrated the unsung personalities and events of Cambridge. He printed these as magnetic plaques and placed them throughout the city with help from a keen group of walkers and art enthusiasts. You can see all 50 overleaf and maybe a few still remain on lampposts and railings along the route.

Art Language Location (ALL) is an art festival taking place over two and a half weeks in locations throughout Cambridge, featuring 50 innovative and experimental contemporary artists from across the UK and beyond who use text in their work.

Each artist must find an appropriate venue for their work: the resulting intervention creates a conversation between artist, artwork and location. This extended exhibition aims to punctuate the city with a series of visually exciting and unexpected encounters in which our everyday interactions with text can be explored and challenged.

BUY The Cambridge Blue Plaque Walk Map