Constellating a Future

Above: Microscape Series (River Poem #2) by Taney Roniger. . At the beginning of the year I quoted from Rebecca Solnit’s recent book, Whose Story Is This?  We are building something immense together that, though invisible and immaterial, is a structure, one we reside within—or, rather, many overlapping structures…Though there are individual voices and people […]

Dragons, Dalmatians and Dancing Gorillas

Hilma af Klint, from A Work on Flowers, Mosses and Lichen (© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk/Photo: Moderna Museet, Albin Dahlström) And while great achievement is rare and difficult at best, it is still rarer and more difficult if, while you work, you must at the same time wrestle with inner demons of self-doubt and […]

In the Fragments

Fresco fragment from Piero della Francesca’s Legend of the True Cross, portraying Constantine’s victory over Maxentius in 312. In Arezzo, Italy, Cappella Bacci. I took hundreds of photographs while I was away, but the one I keep returning to is this fragment. A segment from one of the more damaged frescos by Piero della Francesca […]

Essential Unknowability

Ghostly: ‘Untitled’, 1977, is on show in Agnes Martin’s Tate Modern retrospective Photo: Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society Some would say there has been enough written about Agnes Martin to last us for a while. Her show at the Tate Modern (up through October 11) has produced many reviews, plus two new books about […]