As much as I've written about what becomes alive in art, it was death that made a surprising connection for me recently. A connection between two artists, who I deeply admire, but also between their very different forms of making art in a time where the dead and the living couldn't always be clearly told apart. It begs the question: how do we put death on a canvas, between the lines? The Scottish painter Joan Eardley and the Swiss author Fleur Jaeggy offer some answers. I hav

Self-Portrait, Regina Mosch (2022) John Ashbery writes in his poem "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror": ...the soul is not a soul, Has no secret, is small, and it fits Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention. It's a long poem, and it reflects on a painting by Parmigianino from 1524, in which the artist offers himself as if looked at through a mirror that bulges outward. A convex surface. Curiously, his canvas was a wooden board of the same shape. So he leaves u

Long exposures aren't only interesting for expressing a particular bodily and subcionscious state, as I did with 'becoming one' (see previous post). Leaving your shutter open for an extended length of time, compressing seconds or minutes into one image, can draw attention to the passing or transience of time, connect us to lost pasts, or layer different temporalities on top of each other. With Elisabeth Schilling's project "Invisible Dances", I captured imprints of the past.

Where does music come from when you improvise? Asking about the 'where' of things excites me from a phenomenological perspective: the...

'To collect photography is to collect the world', Susan Sontag writes in On Photography . With a beautiful resonance, this initially...

overexposed at the pipe factory, glasgow, june 2023 Have you ever felt that you needed to hide a part of yourself? Did someone ever look...

over/exposed, june 2023, leith arches edinburgh Making art within an academic inquiry is a thrilling endeavour. Firstly, because the...

The first piece of artistic research, created with the designer of sounds Bryant Keith Bayhan, is screening a couple of times in...

Our NoMilk NoSugar collective straight8 short 'searching for shore' was screening at Alchemy Film & Arts in the Scottish Borders, a...

Over winter, I worked with The Bare Project, an interactive arts company from South Yorkshire, on a film about their two-week residency...