Author: Tom Jeffreys
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I, The Thing in the Margins
It’s the sound that provides the first clue of something amiss. The loud, low growl of audio feedback fills a room already awash with bright green glare. Sitting upright in a shabby armchair is an inscrutable figure. Both feet rest evenly on the ground. Both arms rest evenly on the chair. Its head is turned…
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The Barometer of My Heart
On 20th February 2002, at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), in Paris, philosopher Jacques Derrida asked an audience of students the following question: “The phallus, I mean, the phallos, is it proper to man?” This question opened the eighth session of a series of lectures given by Derrida between 2001 and…
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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 up close. But that’s not to say it’s not possible. Besides, however near your nose is to the glass, there is always a distance between…
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Editorial: Clean Unclean
My side of the desk is scrupulously clean. The other half is a mess of dust and papers, temporarily abandoned books, a pair of tights, a lump of local granite. The line that separates the two is not as clear as I’d like. From the other side, my wife’s stately, slender Mac spaceship turns its…
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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 centre of an oil-black moat. The whole is perched waist-high on a slowly rotating table. Like many architectural models, the piece feels both large and…
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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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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 of a community tree and peered out at you myopically. Since then her work has developed and her subjects proliferated. She has worked for a…
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Oikeusjuttu (The Trial)
In Finland, the wolf is both more and less than an animal; it is a symbol. And this November sees a court case in which the very nature of that symbolism will be on trial. Fifteen men have been accused of the 2013 killing of three wolves (three of a population of around 150) in…
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Tasked to Hear
On 30th March 2013 Mark Peter Wright made his way to a point in South Gare – a two-and-a-half-mile stretch of reclaimed land to the south of Teesmouth – and stopped. He made a note of the conditions (temperature, wind speed, humidity) and of his own body temperature. At 12pm, he switched on his audio…
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What Was Once the Threshing Barn
Public/private, urban/rural, commercial/not-for-profit: it’s not like the waters between the two have ever been crystal clear, but now, with the opening in Somerset of the latest outpost of contemporary art giants Hauser & Wirth (London, Zurich, New York) the silt has been stirred up and it all seems just that little bit muddier than before….
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Walking in the Sky
A small brown kestrel rises over the crest of a hill and pauses, hanging in the wind, scanning the fields below. With a tilt of its wings, it shifts vantage point twice, three times, hangs for a moment, then suddenly slides downwards, a gleam of silver under the high sun. Six foot from the ground,…