Author Archives: sudoman

Here at Labour of Love we get sent our fair share of gallery, exhibition, auction and artist press mailers. While we’re overjoyed to see so much going on and so many people inspired and making there’s not a whole lot that grabs us enough we dive of into the links. Every now and again though…

When we spotted one of Tatiana Gulenkina’s series ‘6 hours’ we loved the colours, then on closer inspection the ghosts of the details and on further reading we enjoyed the whole concept. It seems almost too literal - bringing attention to the melting ice; looking for beauty in the temporal and the catastrophic. Often, similar concepts come off as too righteous if abstracted to far and straight up banal if not far enough. These, however, get it right; they lead in with the image and improve with context. But if that’s all just a little ‘art’ then concentrate on the colour and the graduation in the prints. Lovely, right?

Even better, after a bit of searching we found her site and there’s another series called ‘Things Merging and Falling Apart’. Half of us even prefer it to the ‘6 Hours’ series. Produced in a darkroom, without a camera, using objects directly affecting the paper she’s managed to come up with images that aren’t only delicate and beautiful but that, in places, remind us of the Paradise Garage logo and an old Midlake album cover. In short, we want one, well, actually, 2 of these prints and we’re sure we could find a perfect place for them here at Labour of Love HQ.

We’re unsure if she has any upcoming shows but we’ll be sure to stick a link up on our Twitter feed if we find some. In the meantime you can buy a limited edition print of the 6 Hours series from the folks over at NinteenSixtyEight to tide you over.

So, we’re not sure what happened but we’ve had a run on the amazing Un Elefante Pollock bars in the past week and they’re now all gone. Boo. But we have reordered and are waiting for the restock in a week or so. Yeah. We still have a couple of the ‘Graffiti’ and ‘Typewriter’ styles left but if you’re the guy that was buying 4 at a time you’ll probably be disappointed as unless you’re first in there won’t be enough to fill your order.

We love the original hand finished packaging, it was part of the reason they were so wonderful as gifts or a treat to yourself. Every wrapper was slightly different which really set Un Elefante apart. So we’re a bit unsure what to do about their rebrand. The original packaging is shown above. They have switched to a new design, as shown below, but our jury is out on it. We see the point of the viewing window, it was probably needed - even if the sheer unexpected delight of the initial unwrap is now gone. However, the rest is a bit ‘cute graphic’ for our taste. As always, the rest of the world will disagree and they’ll be huge while we spend our time saying ‘we prefered it before; the perfect mix of craft, art and hidden delight’ while everyone that listens thinks ‘idiots’. What can we say, we like our art austere…

We’ve managed to get our hands on some of the last of the true expressions of their ‘hand crafted, artisan’ intent, so we’ll have them in soon. They’ve stopped making the beautiful original design so we suggest you get in while you can. We’ll need to switch over to the new, and don’t get us wrong, still beautiful Un Elefante bars next time but for now don’t hang around if you’re thinking of getting some as gifts to others or yourself.

We’ll send out a mail when the new stock arrives.