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…

A Monastic Trio

Three good souls are performing, and improvising, their way through a weekday afternoon; large paintings are taking shape in the barn where they congregate. The trio combine music, movement and the slow application of bright acrylic paint. They address the canvas with gestural emphasis, and respond to one another with…

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…

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…

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…

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…