Open studios and exhibitions staged outside traditional white-walled gallery spaces are invariably more welcoming than those occurring within institutional confines. Enjoying art in less fussy surroundings encourages us to be less fearful of the maker or the medium; thus liberated, we become more curious about form and craft even as we savour the transgressive freedom Read More
Scorper by Rob Manguson Smith is a novel centred around scorping – the act of scooping out excess wood when creating a carving or engraving – under the advisement that “the artist is not a special kind of man, but every man is a special kind of artist”. In the Sussex town of Ditchling our Read More
The Persian-Dutch writer Kader Abdolah was an opponent of the regimes of both the Shah and Ayatollah Khomeini, ultimately fleeing to the Netherlands as a political refugee in 1988. He has a degree in Physics, was Writer in Residence at Leiden University in 2006, and has written a large number of novels. The King (“De Read More
The epigraph for Eavan Boland’s latest collection is taken from Virginia Woolf’s essay, Three Guineas – “The outsider will say, ‘in fact, as a woman, I have no country.’” Boland might herself be, “a woman without a country”, given her peripatetic life, dividing her time between Dublin and California where she is Director of the Read More
Philip Gross’s Later follows his much praised collection Deep Field, and the T.S. Eliot prize-winning The Water Table. Largely inspired by the difficult final years he spent alongside his father, this collection moves through the complex traumas of the failing body, and the creeping uncertainty of the mourning process, towards a tentative interaction with the Read More
It is summer 2011 and Adolf Hitler has returned! In Timur Vermes’ latest novel, Look Who’s Back, the notorious dictator finds himself waking up in mysteriously good health in 21st Century Berlin. As he comes to terms with the modern world, Hitler gains a great deal of popularity among the German people, who believe him Read More
Forms of Protest is, at first read, quite a bizarre piece of work. However, amongst Hannah Silva’s strange and unconventional writing there is a wealth of inventive and interesting content. Silva’s background in music, including playing the recorder and her experience in theatre, sees her work with sounds and rhetoric in interesting ways. The collection Read More
A Swiss artist, Roman Signer’s work has avoided the category of “process based” art; yet in suggesting previous interactions between established objects, he, like others, deconstructs your sense of art as a finished work. However, his pieces avoid such categorizations through their inclusion of a visual aftermath; the depiction of the development process and finished Read More
The Only Reason for Time, Fiona Moore’s particularly courageous debut, takes the reader through a very honest and insightful depiction of the poet’s agonizing struggle following the death of her beloved husband. Written days after his death, the opening poem “Postcard” marks the early stages of her grief. Thought-provoking comparisons of both colours and textures Read More
What is the role of painting in contemporary art practice? Where can it be situated within art discourse, and what is its value? Hold, Sway, the current exhibition at Generator Projects, brings together five artists in an attempt to address these questions. The show posits a transitional, mediate space between the flat plane of two-dimensional Read More