Dispatches from the Field

In his Reith lectures Grayson Perry called artists “Pilgrims on the Road to Meaning”. At New Blood Art we wanted to gain insight into our artists personal roads to meaning so we asked them 3 questions: Sara Willett The moment when you are at a party (for example) and someone asks; “What do you do?” […]

HowTheLightGetsIn, is the world’s largest philosophy and music festival and is back in Hay-on-Wye, with thought-provoking debates and powerful talks. This years theme is  Fantasy and Reality and runs from 21st – 31st May. The Institute of Art and Ideas (who hold the festival) are a brilliant organisation – so enlivening to discover radical free […]

A fantastic show at Slade. Highlights included the irrepressible energy of Jeremy Hutchinson and Sangeun Joo. Joo created a space of devotion with rare memorabilia. Hutchinson got in touch with a number of factories around the world, and asked to order a product, with the special requirement that the product have an error that made […]

BIAD’s Margaret Street site is beautiful; the building has intriguing and impossibly imaginative original fittings wherever you look. The setting was used with maximum impact in the BIAD end of year degree show. Showing photographs, Syeda Bibi superimosed signifiers of British ideology over Bangladeshi landscapes in her quietly arresting composites. Natalie O’Keefe made something epic, […]

Photography at UCLAN overlapped happily with social commentary in the work of Helen Stephens, who created portraits of young women aged 21-25 entitled ‘Adult Life’, and Mark Prescott who made touching composites of young teenagers on the thresholds of their homes and the places they like to hang out, all shot between 5 and 6pm […]

Brighton was an enlivening and uplifting, well-curated show, characterised by really strong, engaging painting, which had a raw quality and a naivete. Anita Kavaja created tender paintings often set in domestic spaces depicting human relationships. Elisha Enfield used a really exciting painterly touch – washes, stains, disturbances of paint and curious lighting – to form […]

Derby was a mixed bag. In Photography I liked the deadpan documentation of Samuel Deffley, whose series ’91 Campion Street’ depicted objects with a painterly touch against a tan background, reminiscent of American tromp l’oeil paintings, Wes Anderson’s way with objects and the dangerously bland backgrounds of Francis Bacon. Similarly deadpan, and with an in-built […]

Held at the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane the show sprawled out across 5 large spaces – the work was not densely arranged and each artist got their generous quota of space. The Illustrators displayed their works in a concertina, (snaking down a large space that also contained Photography) which acted as large scale portfolios, […]

It was clear that students at Oxford Brookes had been encouraged to think on their own terms, taken heed of this and moved swiftly onwards.  The show was characterized by the adventurous and individualistic. Often one finds, as is natural in any community, that certain influences become predominant, and at Brookes it was clearly influence […]

Much of the press coverage of the Frieze Art Fair this year has been witty, funny, and just a little snide. It is perhaps unsurprising that Reviews of the fair have focused on the marginal apparatus: on the parties, the celebrities, the sales. This of course may be a semantic point in itself, that the […]