I spent some real quality time at Swiss Cottage Library art gallery on Sunday 27th of October. The ‘journey’ I took leading into the iconic grade 2 listed building led me past the cultural and sporting venues of the Hampstead Theatre and the Swiss Cottage Leisure centre. As I approached the entrance to the Sir Basil Spence-designed library building, and past the classic concrete aggregate pillars of the undercroft, I was drawn toward two glass display areas which contained beautiful flowering plants. It made me stop still for a moment as flowers growing in a library display case is not always what you would expect, but then very little was as I had expected on Sunday, as I was entering a world of the arts and technology melding into really provocative workshops. I was getting involved in the Camden New Wave art programme and I was about to be 3D’d!
The Thingmaker workshop and Ian Drummond’s ‘Take a Look’ exhibition was a wonderful way to spend a Sunday morning. I was pretty quickly scanned on entering the Swiss Cottage art gallery and the results have been fed into cutting-edge technology ready for a 3D version of my head and shoulders to be produced. There was a great buzz around the library with a steady stream of families coming into the gallery to see what was going on. What worked so well was that, having participated in the 3D workshop, children and their parents and carers were taking a great interest in the ‘Take a Look’ exhibition by artist Ian Drummond. The garden shed mock-up let you into a fantastical world of colour and kaleidoscopic patterns.
Later, as I was leaving, I remembered that the specialist display fittings for hanging pictures in the library were running out. As a long shot I asked one of the technicians of the Thingmaker workshop to see if he could ‘print’ out the fitting. “No problem,” he said and proceeded to ‘copy’ an exact 3D version of the fitting – saving the library the expense of going to a metal-work engineer! As I left I thought what a great journey into the world of the arts and 3D printing I’d had.
– Sam Eastop
Cluster manager, Culture and Customers, Camden Council
