I caught an early train to Stoke-on-Trent yesterday. I tried to buy a coffee from the buffet bar. ‘The machine is playing up, what do you want to do?’ the inattendant enquired, before resuming her hilarious phone conversation. Was she suggesting I might want a tea instead? I wasn’t sure.
It was pouring when I reached [...]
A couple of months ago one of my students made a mosaic from sherds he found on the Thames foreshore. His work had striking originality and flair. It wasn’t tidily executed, in fact it was made in a way that almost seemed to re-write the rules that apply in making an effective mosaic. There are [...]
The private view is over. Yesterday we gave a talk about ‘Pattern Industry’ at the Slade School of Fine Art. The talk was in the Darwin Lecture theatre, built on a site in Gower Street where Darwin once lived. Matt has been filming this week, so I put together the presentation. He responded spontaneously to [...]
I have installed the show, as Matt has been on a research trip in Europe for the past fortnight. Intermittent texts document his travels:
‘Stuck in snowdrift. Have to turn round. V. hard to manoeuvre’. Or
‘The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna is staggering. Dozens of Titians, Veroneses and Tintorettos in room after room, and the rooms are [...]
Earlier this week, as I worked, the phone trilled. Multiple messages told me there was an old picture of Matt and David Bowie in the Guardian. ‘Have you seen it yet?’ ‘No’ I said.
This morning, as I prepared to leave the house for the gallery, a chat box popped up on the computer screen, alerting [...]
Through the studio security window – a fold-away grill of metal diamonds, I can see the snow is falling. Big white blobs, in lovely swirling flurries. A lace curtain hangs in front of the glass, threaded with a pattern of white circles over a lattice of elongated squares. Visual rhymes — once you’ve started noticing [...]
In its finishing stages, I realised that all along, unnoticed by me, our show has a consistent and logical theme. While we worked, the components — paintings, wallpaper and mosaic — seemed more or less disparate. Wanting to create a sense of visual unity, I came up with formal correlates between one element and another [...]
This weekend my step-daughter Babette and I scarcely left the house. Babette has a piece in a group show at the Crypt Gallery, St Pancras, which opens this Thursday. Half-way through her foundation year, she has been hard at work on art school applications, which have to be in today. We broke from our respective [...]