Tag: writing
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Finley Styles
Conceptual artist, painter and writer, Finley Styles, was born in Gosport, Hampshire, England on August 15, 1972. The son of market-trader parents, Styles proved academically gifted despite a shoddy school attendance record. From the age of twelve, he would regularly skip high school and, later, 6th form college to look after his parents’ market stall,…
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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 sea and sky. It feels like an apt place and time from which to respond, briefly, to two recent books by JR Carpenter – The…
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Rethinking Mythogeography
I first came across Phil Smith in Walking, Writing and Performance, in which he appears as ‘The Crab Man’, an alter ego also credited as one of the contributors to 2010’s Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways: a collection of fragmentary narratives that construct and deconstruct an approach to walking as an artistic practice, a…
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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 we inhabit: not only the mundane technologies of contemporary existence (the overhead crackle of electricity cables, the whirr of the motorway, the view through the…
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Ishmael House
Ishmael House stands along a small stretch of gravel road leading up a hill away from our town. A two-storey granite brick sentry that appears, alongside an old and dying ash tree as no more than an accent stretching out onto desolate sky. The boundary, not that it is needed, is a fence that seems…
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Ghosts on the Shore
Identities – of people and of places – form slowly over time, through the sedimentary accretion of multiple overlapping layers. Even the oldest or most deeply buried stories never entirely disappear. Sometimes it takes the archaeologist, or the psychoanalyst, to do a little digging. Paul Scraton’s Ghosts on the Shore enacts a sustained process of…
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The Old Weird Albion
Histories and hauntings of the English South When I think of the South Downs, I see a watercolour of Beachy Head by Eric Ravilious. A chalky white cliff illuminated by a lighthouse with an ominous raincloud hovering above it. I remember climbing to the top of the Devil’s Dyke to look at the pastoral Constable…
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Broke-Down Fords and Angels
Part I Dry Creek is where I grew up, but it isn’t my home, not really. It’s the place I went to school, where my family resides, the place I learned that belonging isn’t a thing you get just because you grow up somewhere. Dry Creek is the hole my mother got sick in and…
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Forever Changed in a Second
Part II She sat in the waiting room of the family doctor watching the children play in the wallpaper across the room. Her eyes followed as boys and girls stacked blocks, rolled balls, and carried bright red balloons from scene to scene. Praying that if she stared long enough, the pounding in her chest would…
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Road to New
Part III As we drove across interstate ten towards Baton Rouge, I wasn’t sure if I was saying hello or goodbye. Hello to the miles and miles of Louisiana marsh I hadn’t seen in years. Hello to the hope of something new glimmering in the back of my mind. And goodbye to pretty much everything…
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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…