Rowley Gallery Blog
We recently installed a green wall at Kensington Place. Mike McInnerney is the seventh artist to occupy their Art Wall and he’s filled it with a fantastic forest of trees. Continue reading “Mike McInnerney At Kensington Place”
A line from one of Raymond Chandler’s thrillers inspired the start of this poem, Shelley’s Ozymandias inspired the end, and time gave me the middle, worked on through the winter and spring of 2014, taking for its model Richard Seifert’s 1972 Brutalist Kings Reach Tower by Blackfriars Bridge, where I worked for a number of years at a west-facing window on the ninth floor in the Programmes Department. The soundtrack includes field recordings from Novi Sad, Posnan, Rue Git de Coeur in Paris, and Soho, and the fire was lit in a pot belly stove sometime in 2007.
Tim Cumming / The Rowley Gallery
PS: Tim is performing in Bournemouth on Friday 27th June at the Vita Nova theatre for the launch of Issue 2 of Boscombe Revolution. Tim’s film will be shown alongside live readings.
In 2012, Irish TV viewers were asked to choose their favourite painting. Ardal O’Hanlon chose Sean Scully’s Wall Of Light, Orange Yellow in Dublin City Art Gallery, The Hugh Lane. He got my vote.
We finally got to see Henri Matisse: The Cut Outs, the long awaited exhibition at Tate Modern, though perhaps a wet bank holiday Monday during half-term was not the ideal time to visit. Continue reading “Matisse, Scissors, Paper”
Much of last year I worked with my Pharmacopoeia partner, GP Liz Lee, on a commission for Denmark. Medicinsk Museion is a combined research unit and public museum at Copenhagen University, which in recent years reinvented itself by developing insightful, contemporary exhibitions alongside their historical collection of medical equipment and artefacts. Continue reading “Foam To Femme”
This large letter B is on a rooftop in the Born district of Barcelona. Is it B for Barcelona or is it perhaps B for Born in Barcelona (that old Springsteen classic)? Or maybe it doesn’t stand for either, especially since it’s lying on its back. Maybe it’s B for Brossa, the Catalan poet, playwright and artist Joan Brossa. He liked to play around with letters and it seems to be on the roof of his theatre. We found it when we came looking for Lottie who lives nearby. We met her under the B for Beer. Continue reading “B For Barcelona”
Flamenco dancing was charged with sexual passion and melancholy, with the ‘duende’ of the south – “Nothing could be more antithetical to the Catalan character, or be more damaging to the severity and restraint of our race” (Josep Torras i Bages). Catalans should stick to their traditional ‘sardana’, a dance that expressed the social cooperation of the group, the village – Robert Hughes.
Choreographer: Mark Morris.
Composer: Lou Harrison.
Musicians: Mitchell Drury (violin), Adrienne Varner (piano).
Dancers: Megan Bosaw, Ellen Cooper, Julia Cross, Erin Johnson, Deepa Liegel, Jessie Mays,
Rachel Pattens, Elysia Roscoe, Emma Sanford, Caitlin Schafte, Charlotte Smith, Morgan Spencer,
Elise Walker, Alex Wheelwright.
Grupo BanRara perform a traditional ribbon maypole dance from Guantanamo, Cuba.
The tradition of maypole dancing in Guantanamo came from Haiti via France where maypole dancing was in style in the 18th century as an art dance. The origins of maypole dancing may have began in ancient Babylon during sex worship and fertility rites.
The men dance around one maypole and the women dance around another until a cat’s cradle is intricately woven between them and the dance becomes more frenzied and the two become one.