Visual Fragments

Walk On, MAC Arts Centre, Sat 8th Feb-Sun 30th Mar 2014

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Published by J. Pitts, no. 14 Great St. Andrew Street Seven Dials, July 1, 1813). Copperplate map, with added color, 34 × 45 cm, on sheet 41 × 51 cm. Unknown Author

“The Pilgrims Progress, or, Christians Journey from the City of Destruction in This Evil World to the Celestial City in the World That Is to Come”. Published by J. Pitts, no. 14 Great St. Andrew Street Seven Dials, July 1, 1813. Copperplate map, with added color, 34 × 45 cm, on sheet 41 × 51 cm. Unknown Author.

  “The geography of our consciousness of reality is one of complicated coastlines, lakes and rugged mountains.”

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, Serpents Tail: London 1991, pp.147

In perfect peripatetic timing with the exhibition at the Mead Gallery, Uncommon Ground, Warwick Arts Centre,  Sat 18 Jan – Sat 8 Mar 2014 Walk On at the MAC celebrates 40 years of Art and Walking. The exhibition seeks to examine the myriad ways that artists “since the 1960’s have undertaken a seemingly universal act – taking a walk – as their means to create new types of art. The exhibition proposes that, across all four of the last decades, artists have worked as all kinds of explorers, whether making their marks on rural wildernesses or acting as urban expeditionaries. The exhibition brings together nearly 40 artists who all make work by undertaking a journey on foot. In doing so, they all stake out new artistic territories. Featured Artists include Francis Alÿs, Richard Long, Hamish Fulton, Julian Opie, Bruce Nauman, Marina Abramovic, Sophie Calle, Janet Cardiff, Melanie Manchot, Tim Robinson, Carey Young, Tim Brennan, Mike Collier, Brian Thompson, Alec Finlay, Chris Drury, Dan Holdsworth and Richard Wentworth to name a few.” Continue reading →

Goodbye to all that

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Wish you were here © Denise Startin

Wish you were here © Denise Startin

There was a child went forth – Walt Whitman

“The hurrying tumbling waves, quick broken crests, slapping. The strata of color’d clouds, the long bar of maroon-tint, away solitary by itself – the spread of purity it lies motionless in. The horizon’s edge, the flying sea-crow, the fragrance of salt marsh and shore mud; these became part of that child who went forth everyday, and who now goes, and will always go forth every day.”

Wishing each and everyone one of you a robust and peripatetic New Year. Have a safe trip.

Extract fromLeaves of Grass, Walt Whitman 1855 A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems, Volume I: Poems 1855-1856 Sculley Bradley, Blodgett H. W et al, eds. NY: New York University Press, 1980.

Merry Christmas Every Bodies/Thanks for following

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Winter Path

Winter Path

“Did I Love a dream?

My doubt, accumulation of a former night, ends up
As many a subtle branch, that having remained the true
Woods themselves, proves, alas! that I offered myself alone.”

Extract from “L’après-midi d’un faune”, The Afternoon of a Faun 1875 by Stéphane Mallarmé, quoted in The Poetics of Occasion, Mallarmé and the Poetry of Circumstance, Marian Zwerling Sugano, Stanford University Press, California, 1992:pp.38.

Image reproduced from http://muckmiremarsh.blogspot.co.uk/, accessed 22122013

Uncommon Ground > Land Art in Britain 1966-1979

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Susan Hiller, Addenda to Dedicated to the Unknown Artists: Addenda II, Section 6: A rock-bound coast 1977

Susan Hiller, Addenda to Dedicated to the Unknown Artists: Addenda II, Section 6: A rock-bound coast 1977

Following on from the last exhibition The World Turned Upside Down, Buster Keaton, Sculpture and the Absurd the next touring Exhibition at the Mead Gallery opening 17th Jan 2014, Warwick Arts Centre is Uncommon Ground, “the most comprehensive exhibition of British Land Art to date. Featuring the work of 24 of some of the most important artists and artist groups working in the UK between the mid-1960s and late-1970s, the exhibition demonstrates how the term ‘Landscape’ was questioned and transformed by artists during this period to become the ground for radical artistic experiment.” The exhibition has been curated  Joy Sleeman (Slade), Writer and Curator Ben Tuffnell (Author of Land Art), Nicholas Alfrey (University of Nottingham). Artists featured include Hamish Fulton, Richard Long and Ian Hamilton Finlay. This exhibition dovetails with current reading regarding Feminism, Sexuality and Gender in Literature, Alice Munro: Lives of Girls and Women, where the Landscape itself is character, backdrop and conduit, the route by which the narrative travels although of course women are almost conspicuously absent from this exhibition save one, Susan Hiller, whose incorporation could be perceived as curatorially problematic.

Text quoted from http://www.warwickartscentre.co.uk/whats-on/2014/uncommon-ground-land-art-in-britain-1966-1979/. Image reproduced from http://www.artnet.com, accessed 18122013.