Red Snow
Albedo is the fraction of solar energy reflected from the Earth back into space. The word stems from Latin and means whiteness. Ice, with snow on top of it, has…
Art
Clearing and Cleaning
Through time, and with use, objects become imbued with memories. To tidy them away is to erase the past. Over the past few months, artist John Carroll has been making…
Edge and Shift: Brighton Festival and HOUSE
Agnes Varda, the legendary eighty-six year-old Belgian filmmaker and artist, is putting the finishing touches to an installation. Towers of lurid plastic buckets and baskets, the pleasing wordplay of “Ping-Pong…
Scenes from an Execution Variations
Few things are as messy as war. Cause and effect, right and wrong: our foundational truths unravel in the face of violence and bloodshed. This has not always been the…
Bitumen and Pork
Four busts and an image of creation. BITUMEN AND PORK was an installation to mark the post-performance cabaret of FEAST, a work by theatre company Clout at Battersea Arts Centre…
Ravilious
Fashions in art have a way of carrying all before them. They crash into the public consciousness, all splash and spectacle, and it is all too easy, in the rage…
Ghost Town Luxury
Jing Jin City is a luxurious not-quite ghost town in the north of China. By 2004, some 3,000 luxury villas had been constructed about an hour’s drive from Beijing, along…
Forensics: The anatomy of crime
What kinds of death need investigation? A criminal death is one that “didn’t happen naturally”, according to a Baltimore detective in 2012 documentary, Of Dolls and Murder, on show now…
Wash your mouth out with soap
“Wash your mouth out with soap!” my mother would exclaim. I remember irresistible mud pies as a child, of voluptuously slopped soil, clad upon and between sticky fingers like chocolate…
Forgetful Worlds
Milking parlours are the place of an everyday cleanliness that is found nowhere else. It is difficult type of cleanliness to describe: not tidy in a domestic way, nor sterile,…
The Weight of Stone
The Weight of Stone (2014) is a body of work about the former mining town of Kopparberg in Sweden. Kopparberg used to be a sprawling mining town from the 17th…