Author: Bob Chaundy

Former BBC News journalist now writing and podcasting for Considering Art.

Nancy Fouts, Down the Rabbit Hole

If you like Banksy, then you will love Nancy Fouts. The two artists share that same subversive humour, cleverness and imagination. With Fouts, however, you get a new dimension, literally, as she expresses herself through a variety of styles of sculpture as well as painting. 

In particular, she loves to juxtapose seemingly disconnected objects in order to subvert their function in a playful way. As she puts it, “the real and the surreal go together”. So, a gun is covered in rose thorns to make it impossible to use without hurting oneself, a hummingbird’s long bill acts as a stylus on a record turntable, a rabbit is wearing curlers, a peacock’s fan becomes an Indian chief’s headdress, a lovebird plays with the ring pull of a grenade, a crow wears a ponytail and so on and so forth. As Sir Peter Blake once said, “she makes everyday objects extraordinary”. Continue reading “Nancy Fouts, Down the Rabbit Hole” →

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In My Shoes – Art and the Self since the 1990s

The photo of Sarah Lucas eating a banana from 1990, above, typifies a certain self-confidence, defiance and brashness about the work of the so-called Young Brit Artists of the age which caught the art world’s imagination and made Britannia cool for a while.

Lucas is one of 25 UK-based artists featured in the Arts Council Collection show at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s spacious Longside Gallery at the start of a nationwide tour. It’s entitled In My Shoes – Art and the Self since the 1990s and showcases how the age-old idea of self-portraiture has been developed and adapted in recent years. Many of these artists included themselves in their work not only through portraits in various styles but also in performative ways through film and photography. Continue reading “In My Shoes – Art and the Self since the 1990s” →

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Chiharu Shiota – Beyond Time

When Chiharu Shiota was nine years old, she was awoken by the sound of her neighbour’s house on fire. In the wreckage the following day, she saw their burnt out piano, a sight which both frightened and fascinated her. The silence it instilled remains with her to this day.

“The piano had lost its function but it was even more beautiful than before”, she told Helen Pheby, curator of Shiota’s magical new installation at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP). “A piano that cannot make a sound still carries the memory of the sound. I believe silence is often stronger and more beautiful than any sound can be. The absence of something makes it stronger. Things are most beautiful when they are gone.”

Continue reading “Chiharu Shiota – Beyond Time” →

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Gabriella Boyd – Help Yourself

In 2015 the young artist Gabriella Boyd was commissioned by the Folio Society to illustrate a new edition of Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. It’s not hard to see why. Boyd’s paintings depict the kind of logic only dreams can follow – jumbled up scraps of memory, distortions, misunderstandings, miscommunications, loves, fears, all woven together in a dreamlike narrative.

The title of her new exhibition at Blain/Southern, Help Yourself, is typically ambiguous, for Boyd playfully constructs domestic scenes with warm, positive colours but adds something rather discomforting to them.  Continue reading “Gabriella Boyd – Help Yourself” →

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Tom Hammick – Lunar Voyage

Lunar Voyage, British painter and printmaker Tom Hammick’s series of 17 woodcuts shown in its entirety for the first time, is a thoughtful and thought-provoking journey into space offering a metaphor for the artist’s own odyssey. He has poured into his work references from that era when space travel to the moon caught the imagination of a child growing up in the 1970s and influenced a generation of film makers, authors, architects and creative thinkers generally. Continue reading “Tom Hammick – Lunar Voyage” →

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Humphrey Ocean – I’ve No Idea Either

Though I didn’t know it at the time, I first came across Humphrey Ocean while he was playing bass with Kilburn and the High Roads fronted by Ian Dury. The band was playing second fiddle to The Who at London’s Lyceum ballroom in 1973.

Ocean was then studying, under Dury, at Canterbury Art School and although he says he was a good bass player, he didn’t enjoy the rock business enough to continue with it. Continue reading “Humphrey Ocean – I’ve No Idea Either” →

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