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Untitled book review of A Forest On Many Stems, ed. Laynie Browne (Nightboat Books)
Get PDFUntitled book review of A Forest On Many Stems, ed. Laynie Browne (Nightboat Books
Masataka Ogawa and the search for nipponium
Get PDFCould a Japanese scientist, whose claim to have discovered an element was dismissed, been right all along? Kit Chapman investigate
Untitled book review of No Land in Sight, Charles Simic (Borzoi Books/Alfred A. Knopp)
Get PDFPoetry book revie
Traces of Light and Dark: History, Memory, and Landscape in the Ghost Stories of E. F. Benson
No full textCornwall itself signifies a trace to the ghost story writer E. F. Benson. A young contemporary of M. R. James (they knew each other and Benson attended his readings), Benson spent much of his childhood in Cornwall in a ‘perfectly lovely house’ (Masters 1991: 44) just outside Truro where his father was Bishop. Benson’s Cornish ghost stories start with the trace of memory and often nostalgia. His tales come from within – from his intimate knowledge of Cornwall as a child. Yet they are written from without; he had been living away for many years when he wrote the stories. In this way, his tales involve a re-turning, a remembering and themselves constitute a trace of the past and of his personal experience. Of over fifty ghost stories, there are only six located in Cornwall, but these form distinctive set. Benson has a very specific view of Cornwall, the Cornish and its landscape. This chapter examines his visions of what he calls ‘that soft remote Lotus-land’ (2012: 593). Yet not all is soft here and there is not only granite lying just beneath the surface
As Well As/Instead Of Orpheus: Making, Teaching and Living in Grief
Get PDFIn the early hours of Friday September 13th 2019, a few short months before our wedding, my fiancé Eric, the father of our three-year-old son and his twelve-year-old daughter, an apparently healthy man in his mid-forties, died in his sleep without any warning. This set of fragments examines my attempts to make, teach, and live without him
The Tower of Babel (revised essay + images of paintings)
Get PDFIn the summer of 2010 I found myself collecting and downloading reproductions of works of art that referenced the Tower of Babel which I pasted into a new sketchbook. These included well-known pictures such as those by Gustave Doré and Bruegel as well as more contemporary sculptures and paintings that I found relevant to the topic, including many tarot cards of ‘the tower’, along with photographic details of brickwork and holes in buildings from around the world. Also, in a not uncommon act of synchronicity, my mother produced my copy of The Children’s Bible, which I had not seen since the 1970s. This contains a memorable picture of the tower under construction amongst building site rubble and labour.
By the end of the summer, I had painted a series of 12 towers on A1 paper, another 12 ‘Small Towers’, this time around a foot square in format, and a number of studies and sketchbook pages on the same theme. The series, mainly executed in a mixture of oil paint, oil sticks and coloured inks, included towers that were recognisable from the images I had collected but also more abstract grids and patterns, dots and squares in collision with both themselves and free-flowing inks dribbled onto the page.
Like many artists I spend as much time considering my work, often making studies from it, after the event as before. I draw my own finished work, I think about where it might sit within not only my own output but also how it related to my contemporaries and predecessors. This essay is research after the event, a collation of others’ responses to the topic and also my own retrospective thoughts
Wordsmithery or Smith, Smith & Smith
Get PDFBook reviews of Richard Smith: Artworks 1954-2013 (Estate of Francis Bacon/Thames & Hudson, David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor, Michael Brenson (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux), A Book of Days, Patti Smith (Bloomsbury