In the late 1970s, Keith Arnatt embarked on an unusual series of photographs collected under the title of Gardeners (1978-79). In the years before, he had produced a similar series of works looking at dog walkers, such was the draw of the ordinary for the artist. Essentially, however, it is what Arnatt found in this seemingly everyday scenario that tapped into his usual sense of … Continue reading Responses: Keith Arnatt’s Gardeners (1978-79)
Throughout 2017, I have continued with the responses form of article to works of art and other miscellanea. Like last year, I found that a more interesting way to assess a piece of work was to not simply write an essay but to pair it with a poem; condensing the essence of the reading down into a basic selection of key notes, reactions and atmospheres. … Continue reading Responses: Poems On Landscape And Melancholy (Volume 2)
I have never seen Barry Flanagan’s short video piece, Hole In the Sea (1969), yet I’m not quite sure if I ever quite want to. The short piece, filmed by Flanagan with Gerry Schum in Holland for a Land Art TV exhibition, currently exists in colour and in black & white, contained variously in the Pompidou archive in Paris and the Stedelick Museum in Amsterdam. … Continue reading Responses: Hole In The Sea (1969, 1970), Barry Flanagan
The landscape painter and augmenter, Paul Nash, had a momentary, glimpsed relationship with the Wiltshire town of Avebury. The landscape, which brims with a sense of ancientness and magic, evidently enraptured the painter for a brief spell of creative yield not simply in painting but in photography as a sideline as well. Caught in the trace images and memories of its Neolithic stone circles, its … Continue reading Responses: Avebury Photos (1933 + 1942) – Paul Nash.
Debris degrades and degradation can be measured but can art be this measurement? Orford Ness in Suffolk, a former atomic weapons mechanism research and testing facility, doesn’t ask these questions but the place has attracted such a huge number of artists to its shores that the question of creativity and its role as a reaction to such politically doused spaces cannot help but be evoked. … Continue reading Responses: Blind Landings (2013) – Jane And Louise Wilson.
For some time now I have been involved in a collaborative arts project with local illustrator and artist Katie Craven. Before the first stage of the project could be unleashed onto the unsuspecting public, the project collapsed in on itself thanks to a Belgian art gallery among other things. To show just how close it got to being finished, there’s even a stop press advert … Continue reading Forest (Short Film) and A Screaming Breeze (Book).
While Ai Weiwei’s work with pots represent the artist’s more accessible work, there’s something about his actions and decisions with the, often expensive and historically relevant, pots that seem weirdly cinematic. This isn’t to say that they look like something out of a film (though actually they could easily work as something surreal given the right audience) but that the ideologies behind the works have … Continue reading Ai Weiwei’s Pots and Jean-Luc Godard’s Celluloid.
Celluloid Wicker Man 