Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Science in Art

Featured string: Standing on the shoulders of giants: science in art We don't tend to memorialise scientists in art any more despite still producing great thinkers, any more than we really publicly memorialise military leaders in quite the same way; new statues rising in cities or atriums of public buildings tend to be either corporate …

The Splendour of the Ordinary

Featured string: The Splendour of the Ordinary Spending a lot of time with museum collections and history, as I'm lucky enough to be allowed to, means grappling with the surprising timeline of inventions and "normalisations" (when using stuff that's been invented becomes normal--this can sometimes be a large gap. For example, the first video call was …

Let’s Talk About Dicks, Baby

Featured string: Teeny Weeny Peeny: the phallus We're all adults here. Or at least I hope we are. So we should be able to face the following with some semblance of maturity: there a lot of dicks in art. Especially old art. So many gentlemen's members (very rarely are the members in question attached to ladies, …

The Animal Parade

Featured Strings: If You Liked London Zoo, Animal Charm: Lovely Livestock From the earliest years of our lives and some of our earliest art as human beings (even perhaps before we were human beings), animals are everywhere in art. Before photography, art was the only way of providing any kind of accurate image of unknown …

Against Nature: Changing Views of What’s “Normal”

Featured String: Against Nature This string deals with things that are or were at some point considered "taboo". The word itself doesn't come from English, but has travelled back to English-speakers with James Cook from a number of Polynesian languages, where similar-sounding words have the same meaning: something that's forbidden to do. Some taboos are almost universal: …

In the Beginning was the Word: The Written Word As Art

Featured String: In the Beginning was The Word In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. John:1-1. Writing has been with the human race since at least 5400 years ago, and it's cropped up independently in more than one culture. Apparently one thing our ancestors shared …

Hidden Figures: Disability in Art & Disabled Artists

Featured String: Disability in Art & Artists Disability in artists is usually presented either as the whole of their identity, often erasing the quality of their art, or completely removed from their story, leaving only the art in its place. With this string I did my best to find artists in the collections whose biographies …

Iconoclasm: The Death Of History

Featured String: Iconoclasm & the Reformation What's all this then? The word "Iconoclasm" was coined originally to describe two specific periods of history. This "war on icons" (images of divinities), the First and Second Iconoclasms, took place between 726--787CE and then again between 814--842CE, in the early Christian Byzantine Empire which covered much of modern-day Turkey, …

ArtString: Women in Action (The Doers)

Featured String: Women in Action Throughout art history, in many of the most famous works of art, women are not the actors but the subjects of artwork. They are often relegated to the position of "muse", their work in shaping their own narratives and framing their own perspectives sidelined, forgotten, misattributed, or in some cases deliberately …

Pacific Perspectives, Oceania, and James Cook

Featured string: Cooking up a Storm I created this particular string as a response to two exhibitions I attended more-or-less back-to-back. In a feat of coordination, the British Museum and the Royal Academy have produced two differing exhibitions on Pacific culture recently. They differ in scale, they differ in function, they differ in approach, layout, and …