My aunt was giving a recital today, her only London concert this autumn, so I thought I'd better go as I missed the last one. I suggested the Systems Administrator might come with me since the programme was not too scary, and then we could go to the V&A's plywood exhibition afterwards. Mendelssohn, JS Bach, and Ethel Smyth. Who is Ethel Smyth? asked the SA. I explained that she had written the Suffragette's anthem, and hummed a bit, but it didn't help. She is an interesting pairing with Felix Mendelssohn, given that he was so snotty about Fanny continuing to compose once she got married, even though her husband was absolutely fine with it. I slightly wish I didn't know that, when Felix wrote such attractive music and is a delight otherwise. And now you know it too, if you didn't before.
The plywood exhibition is only small, a temporary display in one room with no admission charge. The big thing at the moment is Pink Floyd, which is ticketed and you would definitely need to book. The queue of people waiting to go in stretched through the Portraits and Memorial Sculptures and half way to the shop. I was taken aback that almost everybody wanting to see Pink Floyd looked so old, and then realised that that was the age that the original Pink Floyd fans were nowadays. We are on the young side for Pink Floyd, and my hair is like a cross between Margaret Attwood and Sir Simon Rattle.
It was only recently I discovered that the thin layers of wood to make plywood are formed by turning logs on a giant spindle and peeling them on a lathe into a single, immensely long piece of veneer, which is then cut down into sheets. I don't know how else I thought they did it, when a piece of ply is wider and longer than the diameter of a tree. Even when I found out how the sheets were cut up I hadn't realised how long ago the rotary lathe technique was developed. It turns out the first versions were in use in the mid nineteenth century, and I always think of ply as a twentieth century phenomenon.
I tried to imagine sitting in the birch ply body of the 1967 racing car as it whizzed around the track at a hundred and fifty miles an hour, and could only think that it was no wonder that so many racing drivers had died. We were on safer ground with the chairs, some of which were very beautiful, especially the 1930s Scandinavian armchair formed out of a single piece of ply, although none of the imitators managed to be as graceful and enticingly buttock shaped as the original 1947 Eames DCM.
The pictures of the Mirror dinghy brought back memories, since my family used to have one, and I remembered too that in our early sailing days on the East Coast there used to be a small, possibly kit built cabin cruiser called Maid of Ply.
Up to now moulded plywood has had to be glued, laminated and pressed in one operation. It lends itself to small scale production, but the Finns have come up with a technical improvement, a ply that can be heated and then shaped under pressure in a cold mould as a single sheet. If anybody was going to improve on plywood it would probably be the Finns, seeing that Finland has so many conifers waiting to be turned into plywood. If only conifers were the main source. At the end of the exhibition we learned that the plywood industry is a major driver of illegal logging and deforestation, trees being turned into veneer in one small factory and pressed into ply in another, by which time the source of the wood is pretty much untraceable. The UK is one of the worst culprits for buying the finished product. I left feeling rather chastened.
No comments:
Post a Comment