This grand old building in central London is being demolished from today to make way for a new student union building at LSE. I was amazed to find this out and I am sure there will be many in that area that will get a bit of a shock when it starts.
I was contacted about making something in the building for a quickly organised exhibition that referenced it’s life and history in some way. The St Philips building started in 1903 as a workhouse Infirmary for the poor before going on to be a hospital for women and then bought by the London School of Economics.
I was shown around the building, all rooms were empty apart from one remaining locked office that was abandoned with all it’s contents intact. I thought that it was as if the room was waiting to die and I wanted to ease its transition from this world.
I double and triple checked that the contents of the room were no longer wanted and they were left to the fate of demolition.
My thought for the office was to leave it intact but to remove the colour from every aspect in the room (via white paint) thereby taking away a layer of reality and connection to our world as it moves closer to its imminent death.
In order to distance the room from our world further I decided to keep the door locked so people had to peer in through the small window.
Waiting Room by Dominic Wilcox
An installation at St Philips Building, Sheffield st, London, WC2A 2EX
Exhibition: Students, Patients, Paupers
You can see the planned new building including a video of the old building here
Larger images on my Project site dominicwilcox.com and flickr.
I’ve been amazed at the amount of press my latest post has received. I’ve just heard it will be on the popular UK programme Have I Got News For You on BBC 2 tonight (14/5/11) at 9pm. It’s one of my favourite shows and I am preparing myself to be humorously (hopefully) abused in front of the nation. UPDATE For those who missed me on Have I got News For You bbc2 its here.
I was interviewed by Paul Coyte yesterday on the UK’s national radio station Gold you can listen to it here…
America’s national public radio NPR did a nice little piece on it here…
It has been featured on The Discovery channel in Canada see here (after the ads)
It was also in the Metro newspaper in London.
And it’s been all over the web. It is interesting how things start spreading out across different media.
To go to the original Finger-Nose post click here
I sometimes use my touchphone in the bath. I know it’s stupid. One problem I encounter is that when put my left hand in the water without thinking, it gets wet and unusable for touchscreen navigation. It is too risky to try to hold and navigate with one hand. I found that I could use my nose to scroll but I couldn’t see where my nose was touching precisely. It was at that point that I came up with this idea of a nose extension ‘finger’ that would allow navigation while my phone is firmly held by one hand.
I did send a tweet from the bath last night which was typed as ‘Hello I am tweeting with my nose’ unfortunately due to the phone’s
auto-correct it sent it as…
I lost 2 followers.
It’s also very handy when out and about multi-tasking on a cold day while wearing gloves. I imagine it would be a great accessory for iPad users.
I bought a handheld stylus that I embedded in the plaster nose. The plaster comes mixed with fibres that make it look hairy.
Although this is handy for me in the bath and outdoors it touches on possible uses for people without use of a hand. Though the design could be made more ‘subtle’ for everday use maybe coming from around the neck.
UPDATE: see the amazing amount of press this received here
It was on BBC’s Have I got News for You here
If you like this you might find my other projects interesting listed on the left menu like my Speed creating project where I made something creative each day for 30 days.
Follow me on twitter or facebook.
Filed under: design, ideas | Tags: hill walking invention drawing illustration
<< Follow me on facebook, twitter, rss or email
Buy a print here
Filed under: ideas | Tags: drawing, fly swat, fringe, Gordon Ramsey, haircut, Kanye West, lady gaga. eyelashes. eyelash extentions, Madonna, sightunseen.com, Tom Cruise
For the new website launch of sightunseen.com I was asked to do some sketches. I did about six pages on the shallow theme of celebrity (Kanye West grabbing, Gordon Ramsey swearing, Madonna dancing and Tom Cruise bouncing). To see them all and an article about me go here.
I have a regret that I didn’t say ‘I love you’ enough to someone before they passed on. I was shy and quiet as a child and I think those direct words just didn’t come out as often as they should have. Shyness can cause so many regrets about things that should have been said but weren’t.
Nov 10th, 2009
