chorography – media materialities

Gallery – [water pigment paper] Working on my text accompaniment to the guide to Paul Noble’s art work, on display currently at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, has had me reflecting again on just how we might describe an encounter, in this case with a world of the imagination, a curiously enigmatic cosmopolis. (As an archaeologist…

Belsay

It looks like one of those wonderful winter late afternoons in the north east of England – sunlight after a morning of heavy rain. Gilbert (Cockton) and Ros (Stansfield) have been out at Belsay, Northumberland [Link] – that extraordinary landscape of classical formalism and gothic romance. Here’s Gilbert’s superb photo of the old border tower…

Hockney’s Yorkshire in San Francisco

David Hockney’s “A Bigger Exhibition” is showing at the de Young Museum in San Francisco – [Link] Yorkshire becomes Hockney’s California art world On show is a lot of work from the last decade, especially since Hockney’s move to the house he had bought his mother in the seaside town of Bridlington in Yorkshire. There…

heritage futures – a design paradigm

Last May I delivered the Reinwardt Memorial Lecture at Amsterdam School of the Arts – [Link] This week it was published as an illustrated booklet – Let me tell you about Hadrian’s Wall: Heritage, Performance, Design The 2012 Reinwardt Lecture. Amsterdam School of Arts, 2013 Background: phases in the growth of the heritage industry this…