Incarnate is a triptych: a conversation between Tom Shakespeare and some of the great works from the Renaissance to the modern era. It focuses on the theme of human embodiment. Incarnate is Shakespeare’s largest art work. It was inspired by the Gothic Nightmares exhibition at Tate Britain. Here it is in (a poor copy – but …
I was in Bermondsey and so grabbed the chance to have a look at the Memory Palace in the White Cube. The accompanying booklet tells me that “memory defines us”. And that art is “a powerful medium for stories missing from history’s official record”. Three of the items felt especially relevant to my current work …
I always learn something from the regular Sotheby’s Selects emails. This month the focus is on Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights c.1490-1505. Here, I’m adding a little to Sotheby’s excellent summary. This reminds us that Bosch’ triptych starts closed to display the third day of the Biblical formation of the earth . The left wing …
I was excited to go to the Barbican exhibitions of Dorothea Lange and Vanessa Winship‘s photography. But what I found out is the Politics of Seeing can be just as rotten as any other Politics. Lange has been described as “principled .., a heroine of the lens“. After her most famous photo, Migrant Mother, was …
What tremendously thoughtful fun I had meandering round Birkbeck with a black mirror, gazing into a fairy ball! Sheila Ghelani had designed our route by placing one of the mirrors she’d created onto a map: we were going to meander around the black hole thus created. Decked out with palm-size pebbles of mirrors in black …
What can we learn from how we look at Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi? I’m really interested in how we look at things. I already mentioned the Mona Lisa as an example of something that maybe we look at in the same way every time. I compared this with the ‘art’ on 15th and 16th century mosques …
Collodion underpinned the birth of art photography. Some of this was shown in the 2018 NPG exhibition on Victorian Giants. I’m mainly working digitally now – but collodion offers a much more physical process. You’re not going to take scores of shots and spend time picking the best one. And you can’t just press undo …
Surface work in Victoria Miro ‘s Mayfair gallery “reflects the ways in which women have been at the heart of abstract art’s development over the past century, from those who propelled the language of abstraction forward, often with little recognition, to those who have built upon the legacy of earlier generations … to open new paths of optical, emotional …
The current painting and poetry exhibition at the Poetry Society draws on Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journal. Zoe Benbow (visual artist) and Sarah Corbett (poet) have collaborated on a reverie about women doing local walking in the landscape. The exhibition is about an inner world with inner landscapes. I went to an inspirational workshop on this. …