Tag: nature
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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 exist there, rich layers of imagery and knowledge that resonated with those viewing and using the charts. The unknown regions were an informational blank, a…
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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 things we might not want to face in ourselves, as individuals or as communities. Different monsters have represented different fears or anxieties in different…
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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 of objects covering walls, ceilings, shelves and probably floors; naturalia, exotica and artificialia arranged in strange juxtapositions, decorative arrays and obscure taxonomies. The visual impression…
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The Unending Cycle
For Ayesha I look into Haruki’s eyes and discover something that disturbs me profoundly. There is a familiarity. In the aftermath of The Demolition Of My Construct (my break-up), I must admit I am suffering from a fear of intimacy with anyone, anything. Even these fluffy felines, Haruki and Mowgli. What I see in his…
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The Second Body
At 6 a.m. on a Thursday morning in November it was completely dark outside, but the butcher’s shop was strip-lit and the raw meat area was full of busy young men. It was difficult to see exactly what they were doing – the men were large and they were moving quickly in a small crowded…
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Concrete Music – Artificial Plant – October
Concrete Music over six foot lying on its back damp-worn sides as souvenirs of basement tenure unmoved to the top floor a sun-bleached face now that the upstairs neighbours are rubble ears within shouting distance. With shells, the BLOCK was returned to itself though imprecisely scythed; concrete lines don’t demarcate but are breached…
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Performance for the Anti-hero
New York-based artist Patrick Jacobs unfolds a carefully crafted stage that invite us to seek wonderment in both natural and unnatural landscapes that might easily be overlooked. Painstakingly constructed models display different species of fungi or weeds in the foreground. Each leaf and blade of grass is shaped to situate a humble scene. Jacobs imbues…
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Shadow Sisters
A pack of dogs, a suggestion of a transformation, a woman in a wild place. A wolf. In the analogue photography of Joanna Pallaris, the time, as Hamlet had it, is out of joint. Double exposures make visible the formation of a rock face through the head of a dog. A woman’s face – the…
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Blood Ties
There was a girl who met up with a wolf, back in Distant Time, when wolves were human. The wolf wanted her for his wife, even though he had two wives already. When he took her home, his two wives smelled her and knew she was human. After a while she had a child –…
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Cae’r Blaidd, or Field of the Wolf
The last wolf died in this place but the hour of the wolf remains and the wolves call for us, call for you calling haunting us with their calling calling for us over and over again It is the time when we cross over as some people say of the passing away in the…
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Charmed
She calls him from a thousand miles distance – sends forth an invisible cord from her edge of cliff to his edge of existence. She calls him in autumn storms, in summer stillness, grooves a new migration route, moons him towards her for tide after tide. Some claim, with disdain, that she practised with…