linda khatir - dartmouth, uk

Linda Khatir uses her magnet to highlight the transient quality of urban beauty

"The image is of a tudor building which that caught fire a couple of weeks ago. The formerly beautiful building was used as the labour exchange back in the seventies and eighties, but its future is now uncertain."

emma tracey - edinburgh, uk

edinburgh's blossom-filled tree lined pathways inspired emma tracey

jania vanderwerff - bellingham, usa

from washington, north western usa, jania vanderwerff has sent in two pictures from the city of bellingham.

"This beauty is located in the city of Bellingham, Washington USA.

Future creatives where I live enjoy the play of Art at the Whatcom Museum's Family Interactive Gallery.

The rain's familiar routine casts it's shadow on the landscape, while inside the FIG the light of beautiful imagination

and laughter fill the space."

brutus carniollus - novi sad, serbia

photographer brutus carniollus takes his magnet and us on a stroll through novi sad, serbia.

http://brut.bukve.net/

Bishopic (Vladičanski dvor)

Saborni hram svetog velikomučenika Georgija

Three hierarchs temple (Hram sveta tri jerarha)

Main square

Petrovaradin fortress clock tower, famous for having hands sized just the opposite than ordinary clock faces hours hand being the longest

Patriarchy in Sremski Karlovci

alexandra koufali - derby, uk

artist Alexandra Koufali has sent in two images from derby.

"They were taken by the riverside in Derby city in East Midlands. This is my favourite place because I am originally form the Med and I love being by the water. These railings remind me of the shape of the sun and sun rays.

In the second photo you can see a wider view of the area and I chose to include the sculpture in the riverside gardens because the ram is the symbol of Derby city.

The riverside in Derby is beautiful."

http://www.alexandraart.co.uk/

brutus carniollus - radovljica, slovenia

slovenian photographer and artist brut has sent in two images from his home town of radovljica and writes..." just came from as stroll through beautiful Radovljica old town. Took two snapshots, the first of a wrought iron fence guarding the side entry to Šivčeva hiša art gallery that held my solo exhibition (actualy a double solo show with a friend of mine) last March and the other one of (again) iron window and door shades on one of the houses (a vinery, actually) along the narow alley serving as a main entry to the historic old town of Radovljica."

andrew branscombe - stoke-on-trent 2

the "there is beauty in the city project" has gone all macho. thanks to AirSpace Gallery's andrew branscombe for leaving the well-trodden path and sending in this image.

dimitra papamerkouri - athens, greece

taken in koropi, a suburb of athens, dimitra papamerkouri presents a vision of floral beauty

sonja van kerkhoff - leiden, netherlands

artist sonja van kerkhoff has sent in this image...

...and writes

A functional beauty
"Beauty is a human virtue or quality. It is about what we choose to see as much as how we see. So I placed "there is BEAUTY in the city" on my back, stood on the balcony in my appartment and faced my city, Leiden. So you see what I see most days. Some who see our balcony wouldn't consider it very beautiful, with the tools and ladder and so on, while others wouldn't consider all the flats around us as very beautiful and neither do I, if I am seeing beauty only as form. What I find beautiful about where I live is that I can easily walk or cycle to where I need to be and that we can use our small balcony for working on new art projects."

ART: http://www.sonjavank.com
BLOG:www.sonjavank.blogspot.com
DESIGN: www.sonjavank.com/design
VIDEOS: www.youtube.com/sonjavank
BOOKMARKS: http://del.icio.us/sonjavank

there is beauty in the city goes to spain

the next step in there is beauty's plan for world domination is set! we have been working with spanish artist and photographer susana lopez fernandez to exhibit the project in gijón. gijón is an industrial city on the northern coast of spain, originally a roman settlement, which grew from a small fishing village into a port city with a population of around 280,000.

the exhibition continues from where the last, in stoke-on-trent, left off. there will, again, be a looped film showing all the images submitted so far, including all submissions received since that last exhibition. additionally, this show will feature prints by 13 artists, selected to show the broad scope of material received and to show just how wide ranging the project has become.

the selected contributors are: anna hindocha, ella klenner, emma thackham, felicity ford, iain macleod-brudenell, jen cantwell, jodie cresswell, joshua daniels, julie brixey-williams, siobhan tarr, sophie gibson, susana lopez fernandez and victor angelo. click on each name to see their selected image.

the show will run from 30th july until 10th august at the ezcurdia gallery. plans are being formulated to present a free "beauty" themed public workshop to run in conjunction with the show.

there is still time to make it into the show. the deadline for submitted images to be included is july 1st, 2010, so send your images in to thereisbeautyinthecity@yahoo.co.uk. and if you can't make that date, don't worry, the project will continue with more exciting plans to exhibit in warsaw in september. so if you haven't got involved yet, apply for that magnet and send us your images of urban beauty.

beauty of the month for april

well done to tony jones - his tea-based image has been chosen as the image of the month for april.

jacqueline leggatt - bangor, uk

artist jacqueline leggatt is on a mission to alter the perceptions of bangor...

I live in the beautiful City of Bangor, which is a very small City in North Wales; the magnet was incorporated in my ongoing art exhibition in an empty shop in the heart of the City.

Bangor has had some bad press recently, with the recession closing lots of shops on our high street, our City looked run down and uncared for.

Myself and fellow art students, Linda Jones and Nia Hughes, who are studying fine art at Coleg Menai, decided to try and brighten up an empty shop in the Deiniol Shopping Centre by installing a temporary art exhibition; 'Impressions of Bangor', with the work being based on the City, with the aim of making art that was accessable and enjoyable to look at.

I have also set up my own Facebook page 'Bangor IS Beautiful' and have a few hundred members who have the same positive attitude about Bangor as myself.

The image I am including is of the magnet placed on one of my hand-cut maps of the City of Bangor, which was placed in the window of our exhibition.

you can join her campaign by visiting the facebook site here

stephanie foundos - philadelphia, usa

stephanie foundos writes... " I have had a lot of fun so far walking and taking pics for your project! This pic seems to be the best and I'd like to submit it to make this little girl happy as well. Her name is Brianna, she is my neighbor. The picture was taken in the Kennsington section of Philadelphia in front of her elementary school, which has an awesome tile mosaic of a double-headed dragon."

there is beauty on the bbc

our project, and its exhibition has cracked the establishment, and made it into the annals of the bbc

to see click on this link

http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/stoke/hi/people_and_places/arts_and_culture/newsid_8612000/8612527.stm

sue james - whanganui, new zealand

sue james has sent in these pictures from the furthest afield so far. whanganui lies some 11,523 miles from stoke-on-trent, on new zealand's north island.

The fishermen are along the river that runs through Whanganui

The park is called Kowhai Park, it's one of the last remaining parks of this kind in NZ, so big and bright.

tony jones - stoke-on-trent, uk

stoke photographer tony jones has sent in this insight into denise o'sullvan's new studio in burslem.

beauties of the month for march

i couldn't separate these two entries so siobhan tarr and julie brixey williams are sharing this month's spoils. both these images sum up perfectly what this project is all about.

there is beauty in exhibitions

there is beauty in the city has become a piece of urban beauty itself. set in the window exhibiting space of AirSpace gallery in stoke-on-trent, the exhibition consists of a block of analogue televisions in varying states of disrepair and visual quality, playing a slideshow of all the project's submitted images, 24 hours a day.

There is Beauty in the City is a collaborative project with the people of the world, which encourages a reframing and rethinking of the urban spaces that we inhabit using a magnet as a tool to renegotiate familiar territories.

This project allows people to take control of the world around them. 'There is beauty in the city' provides a reframing device, which means that people may negotiate the place they live in a new way and see their everyday world differently. The project may inspire change in people's lives, by encouraging them to be proactive rather than reactive or apathetic.

The project could easily be (mis)interpreted as an effort to simply collect and label images of urban spaces and indeed if the project was to be undertaken by just one person or one individual, this idea of ‘beauty’ could become very problematic.
The fact that many people’s views on ‘beauty’ are included in the project makes for a very interesting end result. Although ‘there is beauty in the city’ reads rather like a statement, the processes of photographing the phrase in situ and determining which areas to include, are quite inconclusive and questioning in nature. Additionally, the fact that many different people are working with this phrase on their own terms means that the idea of there being beauty in the city is open to a wide variety of interpretations, which makes it hard for ‘beauty in the city’ to become a fixed idea. It is important to see the phrase ‘there is beauty in the city’ as essentially a starting point or tool for interacting differently with ones’ environment.

a big thanks to everyone who has taken part so far.

Is there a corner of your city that you want to flag up, draw attention to, or label as beautiful?

To join the project and get your hands on a magnet of your own, email: thereisbeautyinthecity@yahoo.co.uk

the exhibition

there is beauty in the city from glen stoker on Vimeo.

as a kid, i could never walk past a radio rentals or granada shop window, without stopping and looking in wide-eyed wonder at the mass of tv sets all generally showing one of the three available tv channels. i was seduced by the visual display, i dreamt that one day i could live in a place like this.

today, those shops are still in our cities. the shop names have changed, the channels have multiplied 100 fold, but they're doing the same thing -nudging at our aspirational materialist instincts and desire to be at the cutting edge of technological advance.

the other thing that has changed is the television itself. more than 80 years after john logie baird gave the first public demonstration of televised silhouettes and moving duotone images, in london's selfridges store, the era of the cathode ray television set is nearing its end. the analogue television and its system of 625 lines is set to become obsolete - forgotten and neglected as the world moves on to bigger, grander and newer ideas - digital, plasma, lcd and hd.

for the analogue tv, read human life - in a full life of, give or take, 80 years, we're born, we negotiate our uncertain early years, before blossoming into fully formed confident adulthood. then the decline as youthful modernity overtakes us, leaving us bewildered before being confined to the ranks of the neglected and forgotten. we die.

but we leave a legacy, in the shape of existence, history, experience and memory - invaluable in the shaping of the modern world and venerated as an indispensable component of what we become.

curated by glen stoker

sarah gee - sunderland, uk

spring officially announced in sunderland.

sarah gee writes..." There is beauty in this city - but you have to look for it"

joshua daniels - london, uk

photographer joshua daniels has sent in this image from the big smoke

"Litter, smoke and alcohol I believe is the blood of the city running through all the streets like veins, people consume smoke and alcohol like food and drink, and discard the leftovers, which leave the streets with the tell tale signs of modern life. I decided to show a close up image rather than a city landscape to show the close up view of the reality of city life."