Adina Mocanu, Fiind Nina/Being Nina (2024)

Thanks to the igneous stone scattered across the fourth floor of MNAC, as you explore this show you find yourself on uneven, uncertain ground which crunches under boot or shoe. Monitors, here and there, are like puddles of intrigue; some are suspended on near-invisible wire; and all screens feature looped…

Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room – Beauty Described by a Spherical Heart (2024)

It is wrong to call this infinity but to left, right, front and behind, the room does appears to stretch, endlessly indeed. You’ll think it possible to fall through the floor, since the suggestion of infinitude is a gaping maw; just as the sky is no longer a limit but…

“I’m not sure yet.”

This is an artwork I heard about, and in truth there was nothing to see. Jon Carritt and Dan Palmer, two artists who share work space had erased themselves from an Open Studio weekend at Phoenix Art Space, Brighton. They had plastered over their studio door. A few indications remained…

Book review: Maylis de Kerangal, Painting Time, 2021

Listing shades of pigment is as writerly as mixing shades of pigment is painterly. Maylis de Kerangal appears to have a handle on both disciplines as she builds the tale of Paula Karst, across a number of well-set scenes in the theatrical world of tromp l’oeil art.  We first meet…

Emma Stibbon: Melting Ice | Rising Tides

Her ink froze. Emma Stibbon was on the deck of the Antigua, a barquentine sailing boat forging a course into the arctic waters above Svalbad, Norway. The waters were rough as well as cold, and the artist was alleviating sea sickness by staying out on deck and drawing. Some works…

Andrew Sim, two rainbows and a forest of plants and trees (2024)

Urban nature is my favourite kind. Parks where ice cream is sold. Botanical gardens serving good coffee. Flower shows curated like art festivals. Tree lined streets leading to civic amenities. And, of course, residential gardens which allow metropolitan types to contemplate collections of plants, ready and to hand, like the…

Tyler Green, Carleton Watkins: Making the West American (2018)

Carleton Watkins made photographs that secured business deals for industrialists. He made photographs that offered conclusive scientific proof to geologists. He made photographs that were both commodities and souvenirs. And he even made photographs in order to give evidence in corporate law. Dominated thus by clients, Watkins is presented, in…

Interview: Paul Watson

An artist and I stand on the summit of Whitehawk Hill, atop the hidden remains of a neolithic encampment. He is dressed in black, and smokes actual cigarettes, as I might have expected. Beyond that I’ve little idea how this meeting, with one of Folklore Twitter’s dark luminaries is about…

The Last Supper, again and again

It was as startling as a ghost. The door was ajar and in the Church of Sant’Ambrogio; it was dark and cool. I looked around me: a medieval christ on the cross; a gothic statuette of Saint Ambrose with a barbed flail; a faint fresco of the mother of God…