Bees, Art and Biodiversity
How can artists improve biodiversity? Philosopher, author and curator Sue Spaid’s 2020 lecture explains (includes video + edited transcript).
birds
Dead Owls and Blue Bottle Flies
Heather Swan, author of Where Honeybees Thrive, explores the taxidermy art of Claire Morgan alongside her own encounters with owls and death.
Endlings: Drawing Extinction
There are many different approaches to drawing animals. In particular there was a shift in the 19th century away from French idealism towards an approach, led by British artists such…
Gold and Guano
“Thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and the earth,” wrote Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Geophilosophy, an essay published in their 1991 collection, What is Philosophy? Standing…
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…
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…
Darwin’s Polar Bear
Many people may be aware that the beaks of Galápagos “finches” (in fact, the islands’ mockingbirds) helped Charles Darwin to develop his ideas about evolution. But few people realize that…
Epicormic Psychology
The regeneration of Australia’s flora and fauna after fire is swift; or is this just a misconception of a nation’s psyche? The winding trail of sandstone rubble ascends…
Dolly
Everyone on Prospect Walk knew Pat Steggles had a problem with drink; it wasn’t just me. For as long as I’d known her she’d always had a glass in her…
Murmuration of Starlings
A huge mass of black sweeps across the sky; surging, swirling and constantly changing form. This is a murmuration of starlings, an extraordinary natural phenomenon seen in the autumn and…
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…
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