Daniel Pryde-Jarman at Sidney Nolan Trust

Sidney Nolan Trust is a bucolic arts centre, which nestles in a valley carved out by a glacier. Along with acres of green land, the late Australian artist’s Herefordshire estate comprises a calmly ramshackle residential home, a preserved studio overstocked with spray paint, and an outlying barn which has become…

Walter and Zoniel, A Simple Act of Wonder (2020)

Before I heard about this exhibition and community-based artwork, Moulescoombe was just a destination on the front of the 49 bus, a neighbourhood so different from the middle-class bubbles in which I’ve lived, I had never gone there. And yet go there, properly, we did, myself and co-writer/co-photographer, 9-year-old Aysha,…

Interview: Suzanne Treister

The time tested way of introducing a story (“Once upon a time…”) is little help when writing a blog about art. And so faced with the most narrative-driven work in this year’s Liverpool Biennial, I don’t know where to begin. HFT The Gardener is a multi-faceted piece display which comprises of some 174…

Interview: Sahej Rahal

The artist appears to have a simple and urgent proposition: to render the past absurd is to neutralise the rhetoric of the political right. Without a golden age to hark about, no one can promise to make America, the UK, or India ‘great again’. And we can instead progress to…

Bob and Roberta Smith, Letter to George Osborne (2015)

You cannot help but wonder: did a 50-line letter painted onto the front and rear of a pair of white radiator units have any incidental effect on government policy? Did it really spark a heated debate? Beyond the headlines about tax credits, the Autumn Statement revealed that the Arts Council…

Morley Threads @ Backlit

In the late 19th century, a wool factory in Alfred House, Nottingham, became an asset of the largest wool manufacturing company in the world. Now the premises are an artist-led studio space. On the face of it, artists have plenty in common with textile workers. Low pay, hazardous conditions (albeit…

Carsten Höller, Karussell (1999)

It’s just a working carousel in an art gallery, no big deal. We are not only used to such wholesale borrowings from the real world, we might expect as much from Carsten Hölller. This Belgian, after all, is the artist responsible for turning Tate Modern and Hayward Gallery into theme…

Bonnie Camplin, Patterns (2015)

There are certain areas of human experience which don’t get on the news, don’t get written into soap opera plotlines and evade the attention of reality TV. They are pretty much off the menu. But testimony does survive around, say, mind control, belief in ESP, perception of extra-dimensional beings, witchcraft, fringe…