Gardening in the Tropics
Brief Lives Gardening in the Tropics, you never know what you’ll turn up. Quite often, bones. In some places they say when volcanoes erupt, they spew out dense…
nature
Nature Studies
Plants Plants are deceptive. You see them there looking as if once rooted they know their places; not like animals, like us always running around, leaving traces. Yet…
Editorial: Tuin Stemmen (Garden Voices)
Situated in the small town of Hummelo in the east of the Netherlands is the private garden of the renown Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf, that poignantly reflects his usual…
The Look Away
Although I cannot see them, I know they are out there. Hare. Fox. Raven. Each waiting to play their part. – Richard Skelton, The Look Away A…
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 Gathering Cloud / An Ocean of Static
I write from Edinburgh, from a flat enveloped by the haar, a cold fog that comes in off the sea and whites out the world. The fog binds land with…
Keep the Ink Moving
The art of Maxim Peter Griffin attunes itself to the spirit of a place. Or is it spirits? His work taps the frequencies that thrum, seldom heard, through the worlds…
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…
Hic fuerunt dracones
Scary Monsters I: mapping the landscape of monstrosity When early map-makers depicted the world, they filled in the familiar regions with exquisite detail – names, places and things thought to…
The monstrous body
Scary Monsters II: global greed and the gluttonous dodo Monsters are not just things that lurk under the bed. They are powerful images that have always been used to represent…
The chimaera
Scary Monsters III: collapsing space If you had walked into one of the princely Wunderkammern or cabinets of curiosity of seventeenth-century Europe, you would have been assailed by the wealth…