landscape
Mark Sheerin
A rare cloud form envelopes the headland and to the east and the west Folkestone is cut off from the known world. This mist shortens the visual range, drawing attention to the chalky soil, the sea gorse and the looping swifts. It also softly frames 18 site specific works of contemporary art that work in sympathy with this historic settlement. Folkestone is, as the Triennial shows, rich in local inspiration. One emblematic work is Oceans Tree of Life (all works 2025) by Jennifer Tee, installed above a coastal landslide known as the Warren (main picture). It is adjacent to a dig site where Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It took until the last room of her exhibition for me to gain any real understanding of the work of Australian Aboriginal artist Emily Kam Kngwarray. Given that Tate Modern’s retrospective of this highly acclaimed painter comprises some 80 paintings and batiks, the process had been slow! To relate to her imagery, it was as though I had first to slough off all expectations about art, and even my world view. Gazing at Winter Awely I 1995, (pictured right) the very last painting in the show, I was suddenly transported back to the Northern Territories, north east of Alice Springs, where Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The railways that we built in India may be well known, but I bet you’ve never heard of the Customs Line, a hedge that stretched 2,500 miles across the subcontinent all the way from the River Indus to the border between Madras and Bengal – the distance between London and Istanbul. Comparable in scale to the great Wall of China, this 40-foot high barrier was created to prevent the smuggling of salt.Before the advent of refrigeration, salt played a crucial role in preserving food. Taxing a substance so essential for survival was a sure way of getting rich and the British East India Company was Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I thought I might never be able to say it’s been a great year for women artists, so forgive me for focusing solely on them.Things were kickstarted with a retrospective of Barbara Kruger (Serpentine Gallery) who uses words and images to illuminate the way language is (mis)used to cajole, bully, manipulate and lie. Having explored similar territory for 50 some years, you’d have thought the American artist would have run out of ideas. Not a bit of it. Dominating the central space was a huge screen showing Untitled (No Comment) (main picture) which explores the Orwellian soup of Read more ...
Sarah Kent
In September 1899, Claude Monet booked into a room at the Savoy Hotel. From there he had a good view of Waterloo Bridge and the south bank beyond. Setting up his easel on a balcony, he began a series of paintings of the river and the buildings on its banks. So entranced was he by the river that, over the next three years, he came back twice to continue working on a series that would mushroom to over 100 canvases.Waterloo Bridge, Overcast 1903 (main picture) shows the bridge packed with pedestrians and horse-drawn, double decker buses picked out in flicks of yellow and red. Making their way Read more ...
India Lewis
Coming at the end of a long year’s gigging, This Is The Kit’s performance at the Barbican on Saturday night was an excellent demonstration of the whole band’s familial, compelling musicianship.Support came from The Raincoats’ Gina Birch (and friends), whose politely raucous set was backgrounded by films that she had made during her art school days – the first of which, she told us, is featured in Women in Revolt!, currently on show at Tate Britain (a still from it is actually the poster for the show). Gina and her two bandmates played a rousing collection of songs, pulling no punches and with Read more ...
peter.quinn
This UK premiere of the award-winning, Dublin-born vocalist and composer Christine Tobin’s latest project, Returning Weather, presented an otherworldly ode to finding home – casting multiple perspectives on our yearning for connection and human warmth.Commissioned by The Dock, a multidisciplinary arts centre in Carrick-on-Shannon, Co Leitrim, the song cycle sees Tobin working for the first time with both traditional Irish musicians and jazz improvisers. As Tobin noted, it was also possibly the first time ever that uilleann pipes have featured as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival.The piper Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A shot of a dead field mouse sets the tone for this sobering “slow cinema” documentary, narrator-director Christopher Morris’s response, simultaneously aghast and philosophical, to the looming environmental catastrophe.Rather than contemplate the decimation of the Amazon rain forests or the melting of the polar ice caps, Morris decided to spend a year filming the barley field that surrounds the 4,000-year-old Boscawen-Rôs East menhir, or standing stone, four miles north-east of Land’s End in Cornwall. According to the late earth mysteries writer John Michell, the so-called Longstone and Read more ...
Issy Brooks-Ward
On the front cover of Noreen Masud’s startling memoir, A Flat Place, a green square of sky is scored across by a notched brown line. It represents the horizon of one of the flat landscapes through which the author travels.Masud is, amongst other things, a theorist of the aphorism, and it is thus striking that the horizons on which she sets her sights throughout the chapters of this book are etymologically linked to this short-form wisdom: the Greek “apo”, which means “away from”, combines with “horizein”, meaning “to bound”.Though Masud never explicitly draws on this connection of wisdom- Read more ...
Andrew Mellor
“Silence,” Andrew Mellor contends, “is more prominent in the northernmost reaches of Europe.” Yet it is more like a texture or an apprehension of vacancy than a state of true soundlessness: sometimes “real and pure”, sometimes it “lingers despite the noise”.Against this muted backdrop, Mellor’s new book The Northern Silence - Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture follows the circuits of musical culture across Scandinavia, Finland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands, tracing the attempts to fill the quiet, asking why “the arts, and classical music in particular, occupy a different position in Read more ...
India Lewis
Annie Proulx’s Fen, Bog & Swamp sees the Pulitzer-winning novelist join a number of authors decrying the ecological devastation we’re wreaking on the planet. James Rebanks’ English Pastoral argued for radical agricultural rethink. Journalist Bronwyn Adcock chronicled Australia’s worst bushfire. And essayist and poet Rebecca Tamás reckoned with the ecological meanings of hospitality, pain and grief.Proulx, mainly known for writing fiction and guides to smallholdings, has become a champion of fens, bogs and swamps, the mulchy sinking places she loves and which are both a victim of and Read more ...
Harriet Mercer
In 2019 Australia endured the hottest, driest year since records began and their bushfire season escalated with unprecedented intensity. The fires and pyro-connective storms that swept the country claimed 33 lives (and a further 400 from smoke inhalation); devastated 186,000 km of land; destroyed 3,500 homes; displaced 65,000 Australians; and killed or displaced near on three billion animals.When most of the world entered lockdown in March 2020, barely a month had passed since the final flames of the Black Summer were extinguished: I remember thinking, if we think we’ve got it bad, what about Read more ...