Tag: birds
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A Good Life / Subsistence
Two poems with accompanying artwork by Linnea Ryshke, extracts from Kindling (Lantern Publishing and Media, September 2021).
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Turning Tables
An in-depth essay on the work of artist-activist Kathryn Eddy, from Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s new book, Listen, we all bleed, published by New Rivers Press, November 2021.
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The Four Seasons
A collaborative essay and acoustic piece by Chris Turnbull and Cecilie Bjørgås Jordheim. The project documents an abandoned black walnut grove in Kemptville, Ontario, through acoustic recordings and observation.
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Behind the Orange Curtain
Besides getting the usual “Go West, Young Man”-type pandering that we all seem to get from American propaganda, a couple things I came across as a Midwest wanderlust adolescent that really resonated with me on multiple levels were teeny-bopper shows like Fox’s The O.C., and MTV’s Laguna Beach, which ultimately planted a Manifest Destiny spiritual…
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Bees, Art and Biodiversity
How can artists improve biodiversity? Philosopher, author and curator Sue Spaid’s 2020 lecture explains (includes video + edited transcript).
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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.
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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 as Edward Lear, that prioritised drawing direct from nature. The work of Amy Dover, a fine artist and illustrator based in Newcastle, England, draws upon…
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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 right up close to the works of Giancarlo Scaglia, I wonder if that same strange place – somewhere between territory and earth – is where…
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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 the hand of the performer. It emits an uncompromising, steady monotone drone, which accompanies a sombre and melancholic chant: ‘This is a la……-ment’. Common Salt…
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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 actually about art, sex and death. As a philosophy undergraduate I was lucky enough be taught by the phenomenologist Dermot Moran. Phenomenology, he explained in…
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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 the polar bear too, informed his grand theory. Letting his fancy run wild, in On the Origin of Species, the man used to thinking in…