Tag: exhibitions
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Traces – Lives, Loves and Loss
“Every story, however hidden, leaves a trace…” A company specialising in site-specific, immersive experiences, Traces brings together contemporary art, theatre and design with old and disused buildings in order to reimagine the long-lost stories of the past. A collaboration between furniture and spatial designer Donna Walker and Talulah Mason, whose expertise is in sets…
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Archipelagos of Rest
The God of Genesis had no use for islands; land rose from sea all at once, assured with purpose. Like cognition, the divine continent is quantifiably useful, brokering communal exchange and the consolidation of cultural routines, yet still – unapologetically – islands persist. These archipelagos, connected to and detached from the whole, seem emblematic of…
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Points of Departure – Estuary 2016
I love the fact that on the coast you can just travel along the edge until the next place. Knowing the way stops becoming an issue even though it isn’t always clear exactly where you are. Everything is continuous. The day that the summer finally breaks into thousands of tiny points of grey drizzle I…
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Dead Space and Ruins
Few things capture the present like the ruins of the past. After the lofty projects of the twentieth century have crumbled or collapsed, we are left today with certain reminders: literature, memories, a socio-political legacy, and – more photogenically – the rotting ruins of sundry grand architectural schemes. The connection between architecture and utopianism has…
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Revisiting Unknown Places
The art of Maria Pääkkönen concerns itself with a reciprocal relationship between drawing and place. On the one hand is the drawing of the place – that which is observed, recorded, remembered, evoked. On the other is the place of the drawing – its physical presence within the confines of the gallery. Somewhere in between…
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HOUSEWORK
In November 2015, eleven artists took on a Victorian ruin. I was one of them. The resulting exhibition, HOUSEWORK, set out to re-inhabit the stripped-out terrace. In it, paintbrushes and brooms became interchangeable as artworks spilled out into architecture or architecture seeped into art. Words were regarded and discarded; sound waves scribbled in haste; phrases…
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Bench
A little over eight years ago Jeppe Hein, the Danish installation artist, gave a presentation at the Barbican at which he talked about his Modified Social Bench series. His installation of outdoor benches, each of which was playfully altered to impair its functionality (one with exaggeratedly short or long legs, one apparently broken in two,…
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Plant Migrations
With human civilisation comes ecological engineering. Over 10,000 years we have changed the world in increasingly dramatic ways. Many of these changes have been deliberate. Many have been the unintended consequences of our unquenchable curiosity and our anthropocentric thinking. How soon did early modifications of grasses in the fertile crescent of our imagination become commodities?…
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I, The Thing in the Margins
It’s the sound that provides the first clue of something amiss. The loud, low growl of audio feedback fills a room already awash with bright green glare. Sitting upright in a shabby armchair is an inscrutable figure. Both feet rest evenly on the ground. Both arms rest evenly on the chair. Its head is turned…
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On a Headland of Lava Beside You
Joanna Kirk and I are both artists living in Blackheath and have become good friends over time as our children are the same age, friends and at school together. This has led to frequent conversations with us sharing books (for example Karl Ove Knausgaard’s) and views on exhibitions and artists, on newspaper articles and TV…
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Finite and Alive
It’s rare for me to write about artists whose work I have never seen face to face. It’s hard to respond through a screen to something created to be viewed up close. But that’s not to say it’s not possible. Besides, however near your nose is to the glass, there is always a distance between…