Space Shifters
The smell of engine oil lingers sharply in my nostrils, hours after I have left the vertiginous room of Richard Wilson’s 20:50, the final coup de théâtre in the Hayward…
Art
Un(in)tended Garden
Notes on that which grows without us Urbs en Horto – City in a Garden – that is my town’s motto. To its architects, this was a matter of greenspace…
Feral Phytocracy
Vegetal Apparitions for the 21st Century Late May, about a month into my three-month residency at the Nida Art Colony (NAC) in Lithuania, a thought from my incessant internal monologue…
Gardens Speak
The Political Performance of Mourning Gardens Speak is an interactive sound installation based on the oral histories of ten ordinary people who were buried in gardens across Syria during the…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…