So much has been written about W.G. Sebald and the use of photographs in his novels that it seems almost fruitless to write further around the subject. With it being one of the defining features of his work, and with a rapidly increasing library of volumes and handbooks exploring the writer’s legacy, I struggled to initially frame the subject I want to write about here: … Continue reading Chasing The Ghost – Excavating Sebald’s Portraits
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
I first met Jean Arp when he was, in fact, not Jean Arp but Hans Arp. The French authorities after the war had forced the name to be changed but there was more to it than that. Hans, so he told me, was born in Strasbourg at 52 Rue du Vieux-Marché-aux-Poissons not far from the cathedral. We would meet regularly and exchange ideas for we … Continue reading Fictions: Arp
This paper was delivered at the Resonant Edge Hauntology Symposium on the 15/06/2017. Full interviews with Grant Gee and James Leyland Kirby will be published later this summer. My talk today is about two specific forms: the writing of W.G. Sebald and the musical work of The Caretaker. My aim is to show the links between the two, with reference to ideas of Hauntology but … Continue reading Memory and Disintegration in the work of W.G. Sebald and The Caretaker
As World War Two loomed, Paul Nash’s obsessions leaned towards more esoteric forms. The landscape became a fantastical entity, the realm of old magic that had already been of much interest to the artist, but one that gradually heightened as reality darkened around him once more. He moved more to photography as a medium in itself, as well as to take reference material for his … Continue reading Responses: Paul Nash’s Monster Field
35mm photographs by Andrew Bartram and The Neptune Project Risley Moss is a wildlife reserve in Warrington famed particularly for its array of insects. It is a reserve dominated by various dragonflies which buzz in the air, bullying many insects from the territory; an echo from a Jurassic past. I was taken there when younger on a day that, with the help of an expert giving … Continue reading Fictions: The Horsefly
As typical when finishing a book that attempts to build a canon, as I have tried to do with Folk Horror, the signalling of its publishing means a whole host of new potential examples surface and come to light. Though there were things in the Folk Horror book that I simply left out by sheer chance – Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz (2007) being a key … Continue reading Folk Horror Curios
It was a rather surreal feeling to find that, whilst watching this year’s Eurovision Song Contest in a flat in France, the work of writer and filmmaker, Alain Robbe-Grillet, continually kept coming to mind. At first I failed to understand what exactly it was that was bringing his typical visual and narrative ploy of human beings frozen, in front of my mind’s eye. I soon … Continue reading The Frozen Time Of Alain Robbe-Grillet
A few months back, I visited the retrospective of Vanessa Bell’s paintings at Dulwich Picture Gallery. The exhibition is still ongoing and an essential visit for anyone with a passion for those strange groups of English rebels that seemed to flourish in the arts around the Fin de siècle. It confirmed for me Bell’s position as one of the most underrated artists from that period, … Continue reading Responses: Virginia Woolf (1912) – Vanessa Bell
Celluloid Wicker Man 