Rowley Gallery Blog
The world’s oldest surviving music hall can still – just – be found…No theatrical facade: just a door set into a peeling wall.
It did take some finding but that’s part of the fun. Once found it’s a place for many happy returns. Wilton’s Music Hall is a fragile survivor, in need of restoration but not too much; it’s shabby chic is a big part of it’s charm. Perhaps stabilisation rather than restoration. Continue reading “Grand Union @ Wilton’s”
Andrew Walton reminded me of Margaret Mellis when he wrote Schwittering. It prompted me to go looking for more. I found this film about her at Culture Unplugged. I also found a letter she sent me in 1996 (in a junk-mail envelope – she liked to recycle) inviting me to the Bede Gallery in Jarrow for an exhibition of her own constructions and of collages by her late husband, Francis Davison. His work gets a brief mention in the film at 49:25. For another mention please also see Postcard From Southwold. Margaret Mellis died aged 95 in 2009, one year after this film was completed.
I first saw this at Caught By The River and couldn’t resist. Now thanks to tweets by Stephen Fry and Kevin Spacey it seems to have gone viral. It’s a lovely old postcard from Claude Friese-Greene.
These are the Fish & Coal Buildings on the Regent’s Canal at King’s Cross. Often when I pass there’s a cormorant sitting on the chimney. Now it looks like they’ve been ticked by Nike. Over the last few weeks these silver shapes have slowly spread over the surrounding walls and roofs so that now they seem to stretch from Camley Street right round to York Way. Continue reading “Across The Buildings”
Werner Herzog was granted exclusive access to the Chauvet Cave in the Ardèche Gorge in southern France. The caves are not normally open to the public. They were discovered in 1994 and found to contain the earliest known paleolithic cave paintings, now estimated to be 30,000 years old. Herzog made a beautiful and moving film, illuminating the paintings hidden so long in the dark. Continue reading “Cave Of Forgotten Dreams”
What first strikes you about these Ice Age objects, suspended on transparent plastic stands in glass cases amidst crowds of 21st-century humans, is that they are absolutely tiny. The largest works are approximately the span of a man’s hand, the smallest the size of a child’s fingernail. For a big show it’s an intimate experience. There’s a lot of squeezing about, bending down and peering in, the peculiar sensation of having to adjust your perception to match their scale, as if squeezing yourself down through the same narrow aperture that leads to the wonders of Chauvet and Lascaux. What you’re experiencing is time travel. You adjust yourself to the conditions, and when you become accustomed to what you see, it’s as if you’re looking back to your own time through the wrong end of a telescope, the one that makes everything far away but pin-sharp. Continue reading “The Vision Thing”
Amen, there’s a ring around the moon… there’s a light inside my chest that switched on when we first met and it will not let me rest… Amen. This is my favourite Jolie Holland song from Escondida.
This is for Ivor Cutler, in performance at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane with The Roches, in the next seat at a Dollar Brand concert at Camden Town Hall, in the same train carriage from Hampstead Heath to Gospel Oak, now sadly departed. Also for Cosmo the cat, Beautiful Cosmo. These colour photographs are 100 years old from Russia. Cosmo is 15 years old from a cat shelter in Haringey.
Five years after its first performance I finally got to see Sutra last week at Sadler’s Wells. It was worth waiting for. It’s an intense, concentrated burst of energy. 20 Kung-Fu monks behaving like curious cats in an exuberent exploration of the ins and outs of boxes. It opens with a ‘choreographer’ (down right) describing a moving line by hand over miniature boxes whilst a monk (centre stage) dances the same line over full size boxes. This duality continues throughout the performance, playing with ideas of thought/action, self/other, inner/outer, micro/macro… Continue reading “Sutra”
I’ve been listening to Free Magic, the new album by Medeski, Martin & Wood pretty much non-stop in my car since I got it about two months ago. I’ve tried changing it but nothing else sounds so good for driving so I keep it on repeat. I looked for a video but there’s nothing yet from the album though I did find this impromptu performance from a concert soundcheck. It’s not really typical but then no one single piece ever is with MMW, they’re just so versatile and eclectic. Enjoy!