Cheesy Celebrity Selfies

Cheesy Celebrity Selfies

Cheesy Celebrity Selfies

An article for the V&A Blog, 2019

In this piece I explain the art and science behind one of my stranger curatorial projects – making cheese using bacteria harvested from the skin of five celebrities. It might sound a bit gross, but making ‘human cheese’ is a fascinating journey into the world of microbes, from their culinary importance in creating flavour to the vital role they play in how our bodies work.

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Author: Catherine Flood 
Images copyright Open Cell

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Getting to know our microbes better through cheese-making both celebrates bold flavours and reminds us of our interdependence with other species. Eating with your microbiome in mind may become common practice in the future.

Interview with Julia Lohmann

Interview with Julia Lohmann

Julia Lohmann

An interview conducted for Icon Magazine, 195, 2019. 

 

 

An interview with Julia Lohmann. We discuss the ecological worldview that informs her experiments with materials - from seaweed to cows stomachs - and her thoughts on museums as spaces for future-making. 

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Author: Catherine Flood
Editor: Priya Khanchandani 
Image copyright Julia Lohmann

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As a designer I want to be like seaweed that grows and has a positive impact on its environment. Not just being benign or neutral, which is already hard to achieve, but having a positive impact. That is my aspiration.

Julia Lohmann

Advertising the Ocean Liner

Advertising the Ocean Liner

Advertising the Ocean Liner

A chapter in Ocean Liners: Glamour, Speed and Style, V&A Publishing, 2017

Ocean Liners - one of the most resonant symbols of modernity -  were the subject of a major exhibition at the V&A in 2018. For the book accompanying the show, I wrote a chapter that examines how posters and other promotional materials embedded these vessels in the popular imagination as marvels of technology, the epitome of luxury, and an expression of national and colonial power.

 

Author: Catherine Flood 
Editor: Daniel Finamore
Editor: Ghislaine Wood

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Ocean liners and skyscrapers were two almost overwhelming monuments of modernity and as such they could inspire a mix of exhilaration, dislocation, and anxiety about change.

Contrary to the Habits of their Sex?

Contrary to the Habits of their Sex?

Contrary to the Habits of their Sex?

Women Drawing on Wood and the Careers of Florence and Adelaide Claxton

 

A chapter in Crafting the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century: Artistry and Industry in Britain, Ashgate, 2013.

This essay is part of an edited collection that addresses the diverse and prolific forms of artistic labour in which women in Britain participated over the course of the nineteenth century. I focus on two sisters, Florence and Adelaide Claxton, who pioneered careers drawing for the illustrated press and who broke the mould as professional women who practiced satire.

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Author: Catherine Flood 
Editor: Kryriaki Hadjiafxendi
Editor: Patricia Zakreski
Image V&A collection
London Transport Posters

London Transport Posters

Pictorial Posters at the Turn of the 20th Century

A chapter in London Transport Posters: A Century of Art and Design, Lund Humphries, 2008

 

London Transport Posters: A Century of Art and Design is a collection of essays that explores the Underground's pioneering role as Britain's greatest patron of poster art. My chapter sets the scene by considering the meaning of the poster as an irresistibly modern medium at the turn of the twentieth century; one that combined new printing technologies and bold aesthetic experiments with a democratic appeal to the urban crowd.

 

Author: Catherine Flood 
Editor: David Bownes
Editor: Oliver Green

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Beyond their commercial purpose in selling tickets, Underground posters were a means of telling Londoners about their city and bringing it into focus