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…
Art
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
Performance for the Anti-hero
New York-based artist Patrick Jacobs unfolds a carefully crafted stage that invite us to seek wonderment in both natural and unnatural landscapes that might easily be overlooked. Painstakingly constructed models…
Shadow Sisters
A pack of dogs, a suggestion of a transformation, a woman in a wild place. A wolf. In the analogue photography of Joanna Pallaris, the time, as Hamlet had it,…
Matriarchs, Monsters and Feral Children
Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein’s monster. The Capitoline Wolf. Mary Shelley. Four names, four figures forming a strange kind of family, if we can call it that. Perhaps better to say, ‘a…
Foxing
Slip like quiet fire through woods on velvet feet (bad fairies gave foxes their foxgloves to transform them into silent hunters)i. I hear a mouse think under a foot of…