Giant Boris Gnome planned for Garden Bridge

Superstar designer Jonas Featherwyck has designed a giant ‘Boris Gnome’ in a bid to fund the shortfall for his troubled multimillion pound Thames Garden Bridge project.

The five-metre high Gnome, which resembles London Mayor Boris Johnson, has been commissioned by Joanie Lubley who said the sculpture will be fashioned from a new material called cheesecrete. “It’s a charming blend of concrete and cheese,” she said. “Darling Jonas created it – by accident apparently – one day in his atelier.” The sculpture will be sited on the north end of the bridge, forming a toll, through which visitors can pass on payment of a £25 charge.

The bridge project has been at the centre of ‘fix claims’ after Freedom of Information requests revealed Lubley, the originator and chief backer of the bridge, has known Boris ‘since he was about four or something’. Commentators have said the Boris Gnome is a ‘distraction’ designed to draw attention away from further investigations into the relationship between the platinum blonde Mayor and the Absolutely Fantastic actor.

A source close to the project refused to disclose why the star designer of the Intertoto Cauldron, and the Hopponov Bus took on the commission. Instead he claimed the cheesecrete was originally going to be used to mimic just the mayor’s famous moptop.

He added: “Lubley’s talking rubbish. It wasn’t a accident. Nothing we do at Featherwyks is an accident and we don’t copy anything either. Ever. But when Jonas realised the sculptural potential afforded by cheesecrete – its pungentialality is how Jonas put it - he fainted.”

Building Journal’s News manager Bill Wurst, the journalist responsible for making the FOI requests, said: “It smells bad.”

Featherwyck refused to comment.

Jonathan Meades' first ever exhibition: 
Ape Forgets Medication
Londonnewcastle Project, Shoreditch

Meades's first exhibition of 'treyfs and artknacks' takes the literal meaning of that which is not kosher. Figuratively it signifies impurity - and Meades's work in every medium is deliberately impure. The title of his box of postcards Pidgin Snaps was explicit. He combines contradictory elements, he fuses opposing idioms, he conjures a rapprochement between his antagonistic precursors.
Artknack evidently suggests: art; nicknack - a probably worthless trinket; knack - a tricksy, meretricious facility; arnaque - French for a con, a scam.
Meades's methods are several and rigorously inauthentic. Painting with numerous tools, froissage, hyper-realist photography, digital manipulation, collage and, above all, chance. When a work is begun there is seldom any conception of where it will lead: the outcome is uncertain until it has been formed.
The works range from the stubbornly monochrome to the tartily gaudy, from myth to abstraction, from the gutter to the dodgily numinous, from domestic proportions to XXXXXL. 

APE FORGETS MEDICATION: Treyfs and Artknacks 
April 7-27, 2016, 12.00 - 7.00 including Sundays
Londonewcastle Project, 28 Redchurch Street, London E2 7DP 

Michael Dean: Sic Glyphs
18 Mar – 22 May, South London Gallery

Michael Dean works across sculpture, photography, drawing and performance, all of which are rooted in his writing and the publication of his work as text in both exhibition and book form. For his solo show at the South London Gallery, Dean presents a new shore of a text in an installation conceived for the SLG’s main space. Concrete, naked steel reinforcement (rebar) and other do-it-yourself materials invoke the physical reality of contemporary urban surfaces. Works are encountered in an intimate experience that centres viewers as protagonists in what the artist describes as a "typographical texty field or a... forest of physically abstracted versions of my writing".  Dean’s explicit intention is for it to matter that it’s you who walks in through the door: that you are so much more than the reader of the text. 

Michael Dean: Sic Glyphs
Mar 18 - May 22 2016. Exhibition is free.
Main Gallery, South London Gallery, 65-67 Peckham Road, London SE5 8UH

Architecture on the Thames East Boat Tour
Saturday 23 April 2pm

London’s future is in the east where some of the world’s most famous architects are transforming this historic industrial landscape into a place to live and work.

This tour will take in landmarks including Richard Rogers’ Dome, the vast Tate and Lyle Sugar Refinery in Silvertown, the Thames Barrier and Joseph Bazalgette’s amazing Victorian Grade I listed Crossness Sewage Treatment Works.

The tour departs from Greenwich Pier, Cutty Sark Gardens at 2pm, and is led by our specialist guide, architect Benedict O'Looney, whose in-depth knowledge guarantees deep insight and thoughtful commentary. Total duration approx. 2.45 hours. Tickets are £35.50.

Lee Miller: A Woman’s War
Imperial War Museum London

Photograph © Lee Miller Archives, England 2015. All rights reserved.

Don’t miss your chance to explore the lives and roles of women during the Second World War through the lens of Lee Miller, one of the most war important photographers of the 20th Century.

This major exhibition examines the experiences of women in Britain and Europe during the Second World War as well as society’s perception of women’s roles before, during and in the immediate aftermath of the war.

Over 150 powerful images are on display alongside Picasso’s portrait of Miller, personal correspondence with Vogue founder Condé Nast and many other objects never seen before.

Lee Miller: A Woman's War
Exhibition runs until 24th April 2016. Tickets £10 adults, £7 concessions, £5 children.
Imperial War Museum, Lambeth Road, London SE1 6HZ Book now

London Transport Museum - A-Z London

A rare opportunity to see inside London Transport Museum’s Depot in Acton, West London, will take place on 23 and 24 April 2016. Design enthusiasts and family visitors to the Museum’s The A to Z of London Open Weekend will have the chance to look around this working Museum Depot, which holds over 320,000 artefacts from London’s transport history and is usually closed to the public. The event will celebrate the 100 year anniversary of the Johnston typeface, created by calligrapher Edward Johnston, with themed workshops, tours, talks and family fun.

London Transport Museum: A-Z London
23-24 April 2016
Exhibition open from 11:00-17:00 (last admission 16:15)
Tickets £10 adults, £8 concessions, children free. Book now.
London Transport Museum, 118-120 Gunnersbury Lane, London, W3 9BQ

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