ART REVIEWS
British artist Nick Smith has a unique process. A former interior designer of 11 years, he was used to working with swatches, those thousands of colour variations each with their own name that you find in expensive design books or even as paint charts in your local DIY store. Back in 2011, a friend challenged him to make an artwork from them. He accepted and hasn’t looked back since and that’s only half the story.
Continue reading “Nick Smith – Pioneers”
“I’ve been trying to get a bright pink for 20 years and haven’t managed it yet,” declares ceramicist Sophie Cook, famous for her elegantly sculpted bottle, pod and teardrop forms. Yet there are plenty of other rich and vibrant colours to behold in her new exhibition entitled Multiplicity at London’s Contemporary Ceramics Centre.
Continue reading “Sophie Cook – Multiplicity”
The portrait above suggests how the aristocracy and the English landscape are as harmonious and natural as the sun that shines down on the rolling hills of the estate over which its subject, Mr Plampin, lauds.
It was around the time that Gainsborough painted the picture that landed estates, sculpted by landscape artists such as Capability Brown, were opened up to the public as places of leisure and which came to influence the British obsession with parks and gardens. The first to do so was Stowe Gardens in Buckinghamshire and part of the theme of Lie of the Land is to trace a line between Stowe and the urban experiment that is Milton Keynes only 15 miles away and which forms the inaugural exhibition in the city’s sparkingly refurbished Milton Keynes Gallery.
Continue reading “Various Artists – The Lie of the Land”
A few days ago I was sitting in a café in the east end of London when a couple of students came in and asked me some pre-prepared questions about how the area had changed over the past decades.
Without having to say anything, I pointed to my flavoured latte and to the vegan cakes on offer. We soon got on to the subject of gentrification, the high price of rents , the erosion of public amenities and the dominance of service industries. Continue reading “Elmgreen and Dragset – This is how we bite our tongue”
As you turn from the corridor of Somerset House’s West Wing into Room 12, you’re in for something of a surprise. It’s quite dark, for a start, with the only light emanating from the film of a tropical rainforest being projected on to a woodpile structure in the centre. Around it are stools created from cylindrical branches of wood on which you can sit and watch the film. And you’re enveloped by a soundtrack of the forest – the birds, insects and rainfall. Continue reading “Desmatamento – David Elia”
Porcelain is that most tough and translucent ceramic that yet seems most delicate and fragile. The Contemporary Ceramics Centre’s new exhibition Porcelain3 brings together the work of three relatively young ceramicists who are creating new perceptions of porcelain in their own special ways.
Continue reading “Porcelain3 – Contemporary Ceramics Centre”
