Tag: art
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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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Modern Naturalism
In 1958, the great Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser published the Mould Manifesto against Rationalism in Architecture. In it he declared, with characteristic chutzpah, that: “Only the engineers and scientists who are capable of living in mould and producing mould creatively will be the masters of tomorrow.” As far as we’re aware, few have taken up…
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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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Travelling with Unfamiliar Spirits
Taking place this October – just in time for Hallowe’en – is a two-week festival of esoteric art, entitled I:MAGE 2014, that promises to explore the fertile relationship between artists and spirit entities. If the world of the esoteric can often seem closed off (almost by definition) then I:MAGE 2014 goes some way towards breaking…
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The Beast is not only the Tiger
The top floor of a modernist apartment block seems an unlikely location for the studio of an artist best-known for his engagement with botany. Nonetheless this is where we find Alberto Baraya, one of Colombia’s most prominent contemporary artists: his working environment not the cavernous white-walled spaces favoured by Bogotá’s other leading practitioners, but a…
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The Sensorial Invisibility of Plants
Laura Cinti’s work stretches the boundaries of our understanding of plant behaviour. Cinti is best known as an artist who works with biology, and, in addition to her own practice, she is also co-founder (with Howard Boland) and co-director of C-LAB, an internationally recognised interdisciplinary art platform that generates and participates in both artistic and…
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The Story of a Single Rock
Like many stories, this one begins with a rock, in fact one rock amongst many: the shifting shingle which geographically defines and continually redefines the salt marshes of Orford Ness. When contemporary artist Anya Gallaccio made her first trip to the shingle spit of the Ness, it was not the accidental sculptures of wire and…
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Phytology
“And though thou seemst a weedling wild – Wild and neglected like to me – Thou still art dear to nature’s child And I will stoop to notice thee For oft like thee, in wild retreat, Arrayed in humble garb like thee, There’s many a seeming weed proves sweet As sweet as garden flowers can…
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Books of the Month
February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 Like a Tree, Walking Vahni Capildeo Carcanet November 2021 Pothos Rosa Campbell Broken Sleep Books October 2021 Cartographies of the Imagination Kirsty Badenoch, Sayan Skandarajah (editors) September 2021 Epic Camilla Nelson Guillemot Press August 2021 Echtrai Journal B G Nichols / Bran Graeme Nairne (editors) AnMór July 2021 Florilegia…
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Touching Wood
Rarely do curators at large public museums co-ordinate concurrent exhibitions to complement each other. But by chance or design, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC) in Santiago, Chile, is bucking the trend. Of the half-dozen or so solo exhibitions currently on show, there are three which share a common material interest: wood. They form, if…
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Twelve-Fisted Boxing Caterpillar
On my way back from the gallery I took a train and experienced the usual flicker of annoyance when the conductor began speaking to us as if we were in a plane. He gave the estimated arrival time, pointed us to the safety notices, alerted us to any suspicious looking bags. It was the usual…