Tag: London
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The Rapture
I dreamed I was the only one left in the world. It was a Friday. I was going to see you all Monday. I went to the marshes on Friday night and lay on the ground on my woollen blanket. I was utterly alone. I took my socks off and my jeans. It was a…
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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 and the overlooked. She imbues commonplace subject matter with a sense of strangeness. She works fast, with transclucent oil paint on very smooth, white, non-absorbent…
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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 in 2014. The performance charted the gradual alienation of mankind through a framework of breakfast, lunch and dinner. The installation BITUMEN AND PORK was an…
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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 to reorder and make sense of what ensues, to take epoch-making headlines for the whole story. It is under these conditions that a talent like…
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Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy
The Human Rights Act (1998), which enacted the European Convention of Human Rights (1950), has been in the firing line almost since it was passed. Some opposition is rooted in its ability to protect dangerous suspects, like giving alleged terrorists the benefit of a fair trial or delaying their extradition. For others, dislike is linked…
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Surface Tension
Surface Tension is a project investigating life, pollution and biodiversity on the River Lea using photography and sound. Focusing on the blurrings of the natural and unnatural, clean and unclean, built and self-willed in a Lea Valley landscape that is constantly being rewritten and remade, the photographs here were taken on 120 film, and the…
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In Richmond Park
Here is the cusp of November colour: deer in a nicotine prairie. Trunks snaked by squirrels, clouds and crows over yellow and russet leaf-rag. On thin legs, bulbous-jointed like twiglets, picking their way through the tussocks, three females pause, wary of me inching toward their group. Of the two stags, one chooses now to move…
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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 place of washed out tones and washed up objects. Timeless characters pick through the sedimentary layers of history; silver and black flows past…
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The Waldorf Project, Chapter II: Colour
“Let me, O let me bathe my soul in colours; let me swallow the sunset and drink the rainbow.” Kahlil Gibran Colour perception. First noted by Aristotle, later defined by Newton: the spectrum of visible light interacting with sensors on the human eye. That is all. Yet, in his work on colour theory, Goethe…
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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 what makes us unique? A geological force in our own right? Certainly this is the view announced in 2012 at the 34th International Geological Congress…
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A Field Guide to East London Wildlife
Humans are not the only species undergoing a process of urbanisation. It is well documented that we have made a mess of this planet, and – depending on who you speak to – it may be too late to do anything about it. But as the world gradually turns to concrete, and species extinction continues…