On a Headland of Lava Beside You
Joanna Kirk and I are both artists living in Blackheath and have become good friends over time as our children are the same age, friends and at school together. This…
drawing
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…
Binbag, Pavement Tree, Chainlink Fence
Dandelions poking through a chainlink fence; brambles sprouting from an unknown corner; a binbag gashed open, spewing out its contents; scattered leaves; a dead fly. Mimei Thompson paints the everyday…
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…
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…
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…
From the Foreshore
This March sees an exhibition of large-scale drawings by Sophie Charalambous hosted by curator and gallerist Jessica Carlisle. The works on show capture the strange energy of the Thames foreshore…
A View from the Other Side
Spot-lit in the cavernous darkness, a model of a city. A model city: monotone, empty, pure, with the pristine edges of laser-cut steel glinting under light. It sits in the…
Lost in Fathoms
Stumbling dim across the surface of the earth: humanity. Our legacy not culture or religion or science, but ruin. Our lasting traces that of footprints, not brain waves. Is this…
Reimagining the British Witch
My first encounter with the works of Hayley Potter was in 2008, and the Secret Creature project: a diverse melange of strange, semi-believable owl-sheep-cat-bat-birds that flocked together in the branches…
Arkhipelagos
There is a sense of relief, upon leaving this exhibition, of being palpably bound up with pavement, sky and, a few short paces away, the murky heave and rush of…