Category: Art
-
Archiving garden sounds
Every time I visit Australia, my home country, my senses are overwhelmed with the smell of native plants and the sound of native animals. The morning after I arrive, I am usually woken by a fury of local bird going about their morning ritual, perched in a tree in the garden just outside my window….
-
How to see climate through plants
Sensory-visual notes across three greenhouse rooms at Brooklyn’s Botanical Gardens This past August in Berlin, I joined 10 other Perennial Institute participants for an all-day excursion to the Berlin-Dahlem Botanical Gardens as part of a week-long programme together exploring creativity through the lens of plants. After touring the garden’s extensive greenhouses, the artist Shota Nakamura…
-
Common Salt
This is an instrument I have never seen before. A slender dark wooden box, one side opening to become a bellow, pushed back and forth in a solemn rhythm by the hand of the performer. It emits an uncompromising, steady monotone drone, which accompanies a sombre and melancholic chant: ‘This is a la……-ment’. Common Salt…
-
Unsent Letter to an Old Art Teacher
Dear Adrian, I’m not drawing anymore. There, I’ve said it. I didn’t become an artist like you always said I could. I write stories now instead. I have always wanted to write a story for you in fact, but no matter how many times I try, or think of trying, I never seem to strike…
-
Carnevale
On the morning of April 21st, my phone showed several missed calls. My colleague Cath had been burgled in the early hours. We spoke briefly as she waited for the police to arrive, and then a text came through, ‘The car’s gone, I’m catching the bus.’ I text back, ‘Forget it, we can postpone’. She…
-
Finley Styles
Conceptual artist, painter and writer, Finley Styles, was born in Gosport, Hampshire, England on August 15, 1972. The son of market-trader parents, Styles proved academically gifted despite a shoddy school attendance record. From the age of twelve, he would regularly skip high school and, later, 6th form college to look after his parents’ market stall,…
-
Keep the Ink Moving
The art of Maxim Peter Griffin attunes itself to the spirit of a place. Or is it spirits? His work taps the frequencies that thrum, seldom heard, through the worlds we inhabit: not only the mundane technologies of contemporary existence (the overhead crackle of electricity cables, the whirr of the motorway, the view through the…
-
Natural Selection
Freud would have loved this exhibition. Ostensibly Natural Selection – a collaboration between artist Andy Holden and his father, ornithologist Peter Holden – is about birds, nests and eggs. It’s actually about art, sex and death. As a philosophy undergraduate I was lucky enough be taught by the phenomenologist Dermot Moran. Phenomenology, he explained in…
-
The Night Horse and the Holy Baboon
Victoria Rance and I met at Newcastle University in 1980. We were studying Fine Art and English Literature respectively and have remained friends ever since. We share an interest in psychology, Jungian ideas and the power of mythology. Victoria Rance’s latest exhibition, The Night Horse and The Holy Baboon, at The Cello Factory Waterloo, was…
-
Of Shadows
One Hundred Objects from the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic Effigies, pentacles, masks and charms. Robes and blades, crosses and cauldrons. The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, Cornwall, is a treasure trove of magical objects and books dedicated to the history of British folk magic and other forms of popular spiritual belief. Photographer…
-
The CleanMeat Revolution
In The Box Gallery at the heart of We The Curious – Bristol’s centre for science and technology – is David Lisser’s exhibition, ‘The CleanMeat Revolution’. From the vantage point of a fictional future, the exhibition looks back at the period around 2030–2080. The show presents artefacts excavated from an imagined past, documentation of protests…