Created in Birmingham

Acclaimed monkey/pop band drawer Jamie Hewlett is touring some work around at the moment with Oxfam:

Under Water Colours is a sensitive and thought-provoking collection of nine watercolours created by Hewlett following a trip he made with Oxfam to Char Atra in Bangladesh earlier this year

The paintings will be at the Art Lounge in the Mailbox until Sunday 29 Nov.

Back in May I flagged up the website for the Birmingham Photographic Grid, a collaborative project documenting Birmingham with photos taken at points of the city determined by (yep, you guessed it) a grid.

You may recall I said that a public exhibition wasn’t too far away.  Well, it’s just been announced and will be held at the Mailbox from 1 November.

There’s more info on the website.

I’ve been feeling a bit off-colour the past couple of days, so apols for the lack of decent posting.  If anything’s going to raise my spirits it’s the prospect of a sodding great whale and a huge robot both turning up in the city.  It’s like Power Rangers or something.

The former comes courtesy of Claudia Losi’s Balena Project as presented by Ikon Gallery (and previously alluded to).  A 25ft cashmere whale will be deposited by the escalators in The Mailbox from 24 Sept to 26 Oct.  This is what it looks like:

Hmm, so it doesn’t look like a fearsome, city-levelling villain, more like me flopped on my sofa feeling sorry for myself.

Meanwhile, flyers for Hello Digital (a mere 6 weeks away and still no-one knows quite what it is) will apparently be distributed around the Bullring tomorrow by a giant robot.  Brilliant!

I’ll write something about Hello Digital when I know what’s going on but details have been trickling out:

• It’ll be happening predominently at Millennium Point and will be free to attend
• SCAMP will kick things off on the first night with an “electro-acoustic and live visual performance”
• An international digital conference called ‘Hello World’ will take place on 23-24 October
• There’ll be an interactive ‘Field of Light‘ from the Plus Expo people, controllable via a microsite (this sounds dead cool)
• Capsule’s ‘Home of Metal‘ project will launch at Wolverhampton Art Gallery on Saturday 25 Oct
• Baskerville: The Animated Movie will get it’s premiere
• Killriculum seems to involve getting kids to watch scary short films while lying in coffins
• Digital Storytelling is “a touching vision of the world we live in”. Hmm, sounds very worthy
• The Light House in Wolverhampton, in association with 4Talent, will be screening “contemporary and classic film from the Film4 back catalogue”

So far the Hello Digital blog and Twitter are up and running and the main site is due to go live any minute now.  Meanwhile here’s the flyer:

Wolverhampton-born graffiti artist Temper has won a national competition to create a sculpture that will be installed at The Cube – the final phase of the Mailbox.

He’s now looking for six people to help bring his vision to life and is touring the Midlands looking for suitable candidates. He’ll be calling at:

• Mander Shopping Centre, Wolverhampton – 8 May
• Paradise Forum, Birmingham – 9 May
• Solihull town centre – 10 May

Or you can nominate yourself or someone else online via the Mailbox’s website.

I first came across Temper via the Headcleaner Sessions mixtapes on his site (especially the K Delight and DJ Noize ones) which still seem to be there. He’s recently been feted by the Sunday supplements, had a design used on a Sprite can and decorated part of Saatchi & Saatchi’s London offices. The owners of The Cube weren’t wrong when they describe him to the Birmingham Post as “one of the country’s most exciting young talents”.