Category: Clean Unclean
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Washing Hands
About twenty years ago I met an Irish girl. She had grown up in the countryside on a farm and, when she told me about her childhood, it sounded like something out of Ryan’s Daughter. Quite the contrast to my own city childhood, growing up in London. These photographs are inspired by a story she…
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Ignaz Semmelweis and Anthropogenic Global Warming
Mortality rates in mothers from childbirth in Europe were shockingly high during the mid-19th century. Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician working in the General Hospital of Vienna, was curious as to why the medical students’ obstetrician clinic had a mortality rate over five times higher than the trainee midwives’ clinic within the same hospital. His…
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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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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 a very high albedo. Red snow describes an area of ice polluted, as it were, with red algae. Red algae is typically a mix of…
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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 a series of still-life drawings based around the kitchen table at his home in Manchester. The table tends to be a focal point in the…
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Connswater
Our river wasn’t a clean river, a mountain stream, a babbling brook, or a silver girl. It was a filthy river, a city river, forsaken, neglected. Long gone, the glory days, when it was thick with trout and where, according to my father, King Billy watered his horses on his way to the Boyne;…
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Inca Doves
Is it odd to say I thought of you as I pulled a dead dove from the swimming pool? Spine up to God, floating lightly with its bright beak face down. Streams of red outlined the strange sight. I gently scooped him up, ignorant of sex, his eyes closed so gently as if in…
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Scenes from an Execution Variations
Few things are as messy as war. Cause and effect, right and wrong: our foundational truths unravel in the face of violence and bloodshed. This has not always been the case when it comes to the art of war. Classical depictions of war were grand, complex compositions, often mythological or generalised. In medieval times, the…
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you are and onto
neither of you nor not this in stance beside congruities one thing not a way …
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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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Soap / Eternity / Rendering
INSTRUCTIONS ON A BAR OF NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY SOAP Do what you want, live how you want. Get it behind your ears and all over the skin you want. Do not think about machines. Read what you will, focus your eyes on grime and slime and free will. Or grace,…