Art & the Individual

We once built wonderous gardens with the dead, where one could walk among the living and talk to the stones. It's interesting how much our views on, and interaction with these places, have changed in the last 150 years. I only know of 2 people who would walk these grave gardens now and do so with the balanced appreciation of death AND life that the Victorians intended. Most would solely consider visiting them a sombre affair, something reserved for anniversaries, or wholly av

I always find our perception of scale falters when we get in to these numbers. Trying to reconcile that number with the fullness of even one life, its like trying to hold 10,000 years in your mind. 800,000 people in a photo look like a macro image of a multi coloured carpet. Whole lives just individual strands of threaded fabric, a person just a pixel or two. Yet social media makes some people think this is an attainable and appropriate level of reach. As though we should all

Yeah that will be one of the more out their titles ill ever write, but don't worry you didn't just lose braincells, it does say what you think, and that does indeed imply that fish covered lampposts will teach us about the loss of public art. Now im sure anyone who's walked down the river Thames in London will already have some notion for what I'm talking about, but for the many who've not had the privilege of that riverside walk, i will explain but first let me give our scen

Something fascinating was captured when the market for ceramics in 19th century England saw a shift. Now im aware that “fascinating” and “the 19thC English ceramic market” aren’t two things many would place together, but bear with me. You see for the preceding centuries the county of Staffordshire had cemented itself at the heart of English pottery, largely thanks to its ideal geological conditions for such an industry. Amongst the dishes and cups this industry produced, one

Entrenched by others greed & fear, we carve our humanity in to shell casings, ironic reminder of their canvases antithesis. Brass flowers in the mud. Trench art is perhaps the most poignant medium of art we have. The conditions for its creation abhorrent, yet the end result stand as endearing testaments to our humanity, the best of our lives, our humour, our hope, found carved in to the worst of our innovations brass cloak. For those unfamiliar, trench art is the decoration a

That is how id best surmise a lot of online discourse as of late. Internet comment sections seem to have moved on from the long lost age of "first" through to a thousand people thinking it was open mic night, now we wade through ten thousand more contrarians, either so desperate for engagement or so desperately unhappy with their own lives that they will pick, punch down, and pull apart anything they see. Whether it be based on personal preference, imagined slight, or perhaps

It is the September of 1940, France has fallen to Germany, the people caught between bombs, blitzkrieg and broken leadership. The mailed fist of fascism tightens about autonomy's throat. Those who work in cultural/national institutions find out they are to be replaced by "German-Approved" staff members. "I feel I will go mad, literally, if I don't do something!" - A. Humbert It is this tumultuous environment that caused two workers at the Musée national des Arts et Tradition

I think its safe to say we've all seen at least one video online in which a situation unfolds dramatically and often suddenly. I think its also fair to say that we've all seen (or made) comments on such videos to the affect of "I'd have dodged that" or "how did they not see that coming". I find these interesting because it displays just how readily and poorly we position ourselves in another's scene. These comments made always seem to ignore that the cameras POV is not the pe

'Interior in Strandgade, Sunlight on the Floor' A descriptive title for a painting, its neutrality matched to its subject. It is in that neutrality we find the openness to apply ourselves outside of ego, and in doing so find the contrast of thoughts and emotions that often makes the feeling of Sonder so overwhelming. The glove left behind at the bus stop goes from an item of insignificance, a neutral player in your world, to the doorway barely containing the fullness of anoth

Im sure many of you will know the term 'Easter Egg'. It is the name given to hidden messages, motifs, or even features in media, most commonly found in video games. This usage of the term was coined by Steve Wright, an Atari director in the 80s. But this moment of phrasing isn't the interesting part of the story. The interesting part is why Atari directors suddenly felt the need to to address, name, and define the presence of these hidden inclusions. You see, company policy a

A motionless mouse and quiet keyboard filled my peripheries for hours. Sentences half formed, paragraphs written through in rough part before being deleted. Thoughts that jump from one place to the next, at times languishing in the paradoxical void of simply trying to think of "something to think of". Now some of this stop-start stalling is undoubtedly due in part to the quantity of writing put out over the last year. As familiar areas are exhausted the demands of research an

Those were the words of the acclaimed French publication 'L'Illustration' written in a review of the 1850 Salon showing of Gustave Courbet's painting 'The Stone Breakers'. The review would go on to describe the work as being of poor composition, failing to add importance to its subject, and with lighting that was not "appropriate". Other critics would lambast the thickly applied palette knife paint as "careless", they'd describe the subjects as "Brutish, worn, and dirty". Ove

Once again I’m rewatching the office. At this point it’s a background playlist in my life, something to put on across those nebulous holiday periods, or the second half of a long haul flight. It has cropped up with varied frequency across the last decade since I first saw it. This is not unique, to me or this show. Yet after all this time there are still jokes I missed, even on the third, fifth, or fifteenth rewatch. There are quotes I’ve misremembered, misattributed, and app

I must have heard that request thousands of times in my five years as a dispensary worker. There was an assumption that the highest THC indica is the “best” you could get. But much like assuming the “best” art is the highest priced or most liked, it is a deeply flawed assumption. For much like art, choosing the “best” strain to smoke is a highly individualised and subjective process. I spent the better part of my last 2 years in the industry working on educating and explaini

When I ask them for feedback they wont placate me, there'll be no false platitudes or white lies, there will just be the work. The work with all its faults and glories, the work with a underlying flaw that requires whole sections be rebuilt and reworked, the work with its need for minor polish, the work they dont like personally but understand as a facet of craft and concept. Sure we may disagree over the severity of some of those faults, one of us may believe the works core

When are you building on an idea, and when are you just repackaging it for sale, when is it inspiration that motivates creation, and when is it commodification that motivates imitation. It is a subject never far from striking a nerve, ask 3 artists what they think of it and you'll usually get 6 different opinions. Which honestly makes sense, there is no cut and dry answer, the subject is littered with nuance. The point of transition from imitated to inspired is as nebulous an

That surmises far too much of the art championed in online spaces, pictures that paint a thousand words and all of them say nothing. Repeated visual punchlines about social media as pills we’re addicted to, so exhaustedly redone they’re verging on becoming meta comment on themselves. Lightroom presets and black mist filters, the controllable and purchasable Kinkade pipeline for millennials and Gen Z. The epileptic gifs and endless memetic iconography dance somewhere between W

Outrage politics and rage baited clicks have dramatically skewed the discourse around creative media. One post on reddit blows up, centred around a perceived issue (that may or may not be real depending on how much the poster was on their phone whilst watching, or just a general lack of media literacy) and suddenly that entire TV show/Film/Game is the worst thing ever. Next thing you know people who haven't watched or played it are picking it apart. Minor issues are touted as

We've all seen it happen here right? At least those of us who've been here a few years have; A "collector" buys something new, and the artwork/artist is heralded as x or y, the greatest in terms of z, their work "speaks" of the "raw" and "emotional" (the emotion never specified of course). It may not even be an abstract work, it may be some very base imagery, a reinvention of a visual pun or metaphor a 15 year old posted on tumblr in 2012 (ohhhh a pill packet with social medi

When you buy or support a work of art, whether that be through movie tickets or a cardboard painting at the corner of the block, you are casting a cultural vote. A vote you can cast without limit other than your own, a vote you can cast any day, one you can even cast for conflicting ideals, and surely will, as testament to the nuanced complexity that makes up us all. Now whilst many understand that at face value, that going to see superhero movies results in more content in k