Anne-Marie Creamer
Sensing Spaces Architecture Reimagined Royal Academy of Arts
Visited 6th February 2013 
Projections of Architects quotes onto two layers of floor to ceiling gauze create an amazing 3D quality in a very simple way


- Pezo von Ellrichshausen Chilean

Installation on a grand scale, it appears a utilitarian fairytale castle, solid, using untreated pine board built by Bob the builder instead of Prince Charming. It is wonderful to be able to climb all around it, peeking through tiny apertures to gaze down on the tiny creatures below while in the vantage point of the Angels . A truly up close and personal encounter with gold glistening cherubs while your senses respond to the smell of pine and the touch of rough wood.
Kengo Kuma Japanese “I always start with something small, breaking down materials into particles or fragments that can be recombined into units of the right scale to provide comfort and intimacy”

Four mm diameter whittled bamboo sticks infused with aromas. This installation didn’t seem driven by architecture but felt ethereal, it communicated sensation and sensitivity.
Diebedo Francis Kere African “Architecture is purely about people’

- “I believe it is important to engage people in the process of building so that they have an investment in what is developed. Through thinking and working together people find that the built object becomes part of s bonding experience”

- Li Xiaodong “According to the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Zi, what is important is what is contained not the container”

- Under-lit white walkways gave a very bleak introduction to what at first feels like the entry into a night lit Norwegian forest. This is a trick filled maze of beach, plywood, pebbles, gravel and mirrors. The mirrors are used with clever manipulation to fool your senses.
Grafton Architects ‘Pleasure in moving from darkness to light or vice versa because as humans we are cyclical”

- I found this environment oppressive and threatening. It’s monumental proportions had the feeling of a mausoleum or Beirut prison, with a hint of light or freedom.It looked and felt like heavy concrete but was actually mortar, sand, plaster, pva and emulsion paint . The walls felt like sandpaper and the apparent marble seats were painted wood.
- This extraordinary exhibition is interactive and creates notions of normality while constantly altering it’s atmosphere and your your perceptive state. The main manipulator ingredient is the changing use of light, either by it’s reflection or containment or its freedom to move and change.The curator Kate Goodwin asks us to turn off our rational mind , unlearn and attempt to reconnect with our core senses as the title requests Sensing Spaces Architecture REIMAGINED.
- Jaki Irvine ‘This thing echoes’ Frith Street Gallery 17mins and 37 seconds
- An Irish ballad of cello, piano, violin and voice hauntingly composed by the artist gradually building to create a sadness that is an unusual experience in a contemporary video installation

- Emotional, eccentric and immersive.

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Filmed in Mexico City it portrays the daily routines of street sellers, all desperately poor. The only discordant element for me was the woman standing on the zebra crossing gyrating a hula hoop. The only part of the film that felt contrived and laboured, it felt it was shouting about life going in circles where elsewhere in the video this message was subtle. It broke my involvement and concentration and removed me back to the Gallery space.Otherwise I loved its eccentricity and haunting ballad. Images that have fixed in my mind include all the children’s colourful windmills against a huge pile of black garbage bags and the keys used as bells by the street sellers, their Heath Robinson bicycles, supporting whet stones for knife sharpening and mobile plantain ovens or invented to carry their particular wares.

- The Box commissioned space at Pippa Houldsworth Gallery
Susan Hiller ‘Sounding’ for The Box

Sound frequencies and visual pattens translated from radio waves emitted by the Big Bang with a series of eye witness accounts of extra terrestrial phenomena. Referencing cosmology, dreams and contemporary visionary experiences. commissioned for The box.It reminded me of the iPhone photographs I took of our flat screen TV just before it ‘went with a bang’
In preparation for Anne-Marie Creamers Drawing lab 3 in March we were asked to produce three drawings documenting our reactions and experience on the days trip.
Blue, illusion and the perceptive state of the viewer were foremost in my mind when I did my drawings.

Katharina Fritsch Han/Cock for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square was the subject for drawing 1. Humour runs through her work and I was snapping pictures of a huge party of very small children wearing high visibility jackets at the base of ‘Cock’. I was thinking about it coming to life and if colour on the square changed making the Cock red and all the London buses blue…. 
Drawing number 2 (blue biro) was based on the odd illusion on my bus home, the ghostly apparition traveling outside the bus window, unseen by all the people on the street
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I picked up the evening Standard and drawing 3 progressed as a result of my musings on glass, reflections and things not being quite what they seem. I worked using sticky back plastic to lift off the surface of printed figurative images in the paper. Photograph 1 is on the floor and 2 is the work placed against a window
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Ilya and Emilia Kabakov were artists Anne-marie considered during our seminar on Drawing, Narrative and Spatiality. Ilya and Emilia Kabakov are Russian-born, American-based artists that collaborate on environments which fuse elements of the everyday with those of the conceptual. Kabakov is recognised as the most important Russian artist to have emerged in the late 20th century. His installations speak as much about conditions in post-Stalinist Russia as they do about the human condition universally. Kabakov’s major output during the 1970s consisted of albums : collections of drawings and text assembled in “books” of 30 to 100 pages each and performed for friends and fellow artists at Kabakov’s famous Sretensky Boulevard attic studio.
Anne Marie Drawing Lab 3 7th March 2014
We were split into three groups. Walls. Floor and performance. I was selected to devise ways of showing our work in an innovative way by using the floor. We started by each person presenting their drawings and thoughts. Blue, illusion and disrupting the perceptive state of the viewer were still my main considerations.

I was keen to use the blue chairs in an unexpected way. I projected my sticky back plastic onto the upper walls and ceiling and provided a different viewing point for the viewer. Achieving the viewer position entailed abandoning all dignity and being confident and agile enough to become a figure of fun.

Our floor version of Grafton Architects . Coats layered over the table created a dark tunnel.Lying on your back and progressing through, you encountered drawings on the roof and sides of the tunnel. 
For the second task I was again selected for the floor group. I was keen to amalgamate and build on to the first groups tunnel by connecting the Hanna Hoch inspired photocopies that the previous wall group had hung on the wall and ceiling. Inspired by Louis Bougeios I wanted to create a spider like creature and her lair.
Quite correctly the group wanted to completely alter the present location of the floor drawings so the viewers would have a fresh perspective on the CFD space. We compromised with a ‘spider monster’ and a new representation for the bulk of drawings. While completely different in their impacts the two were united in their use of string as an ‘air’ drawing ultimately connecting to the open window where my drawing was placed in it’s correct reflective position on the outside 


Anne-Marie Creamer In drawings, paintings and videos Anne-Marie explores and experiments with multi layered narratives.Embedded in place, her work often includes lost or found artefacts or chance. Stills from the video Meeting the Pied Piper in Brasov lasting 7 minutes, it was an unplanned capture of an instant event of dancing children in Sze’key, Romania, a narrative that incorpoates wide ranging references. The film is shown flipped upside down.

Amnesia drawings A total of 80 drawings, each 12×10 inches in ink or watercolour were drawn for the Amnesia animation 2001



There is a narrative and relationship to photography and film stills. Each drawing was scanned into a computer, the drawings were placed in time by animation.

Meeting the pied piper in Brasov a paper prologue 6mins 52seconds
‘Meeting the Pied Piper in Brasov, a paper prologue’