• The Devil’s Quoits

    Having visited a fake cave, I was intrigued to visit a fake stone circle. In its early bronze age heyday, Devil’s Quoits comprised of 36 standing stones in a ring with a 79m diameter. Between the middle ages and the present all but one went missing. Today most of them have been relocated, rounded up …

    April 17, 2023

  • Book review: White Sight, Nicholas Mirzoeff

    Nineteenth century civic statues are so boring. Colourless, elevated, obscure, pompous, they have, for a very long time, eluded questioning. To topple one of these monuments, to go so far as to dump one into the sea, is to make the whatever bronze idol, appear to us fresh, and in disgrace. If there is such …

    April 6, 2023

  • System Interference

    The first review of this show is scratched into the dirt on the side of a car parked outside: “This is cool”, it appears to relate to the car. I say ‘parked’. In fact the vehicle is dumped on its roof. It’s just a silver Toyota but, inverted, it’s become a focal point for local …

    September 18, 2022

  • Anathemata

    There was an obvious first question raised by this densely packed show at Mostyn: ‘What is an Anathemata?’ Notes reveal it to mean a solemn blaming from the church. To be met with an anathemata results in excommunication. And this show gathers three writers who were famous outsiders and a fourth known mostly to poetry …

    October 12, 2021

  • Book: After Lockdown – A Metamorphosis, by Bruno Latour

    After Lockdown is a slim analysis of life under covid, against the ongoing backdrop of the climate emergency. Latour offers us the possibility that this experience of remote working and super spreading could all offer a lasting change in our mentalities. It could be so radical we swap our human outlook for that of a …

    October 1, 2021

  • 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 a gallery to show, largely, …

    September 29, 2021

  • Book: The White Birch: A Russian Reflection, by Tom Jeffreys

    Somewhere between nature writing, cultural history and travel writing sits Tom Jeffreys’ companionable guide to Russia, The White Birch. His point of departure is a single species of tree. There are white birches in palatial gardens, botanical gardens, and protected forest; in nineteenth century landscape paintings, realist novels, dissident poetry and contemporary artworks. It emerges …

    September 27, 2021