Talk Art

We meet Mary Ramsden to discuss her new solo exhibition Desire Line, opening this week at Pilar Corrias, London.Captivated by the sheer range of ideas and images that a passage of paint can convey, from a tuft of grass to a soaring patch of sky, Ramsden revels in the boundless versatility of her medium. The artist brings a range of references to this new body of work, including English landscape painting, the subtle palette and chromatic intelligence of Les Nabis painters Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, and a keen engagement with poetry and literature. Ramsden’s title, Desire Line, refers to a phenomenon whereby a path emerges through spontaneous and habitual use, whether in a park, pasture or wilderness.Based in North Yorkshire, many of Ramsden’s recent paintings reflect the textures of the local landscape as well as the qualities of northern light. The artist considers paint earthy, modest and infinitely adaptable, with the capacity to conjure atmospheres, images and metaphors, all within a single set of brushstrokes. Dark oxygen (all works 2024) evokes a moonlit landscape, with patches of cool lilacs and silvery blues and greens. Touches of rust and warm colours mark the edges, while the whole painting seems to be embraced by a quivering penumbra. If Dark oxygen has a wintry chill, a sense of abundant, generative life characterises the surface of My desire is not a thinking. In a haze of peachy orange, as if bathed in the light of a sunrise, sections of paint emerge on the canvas like patches of lichen or moss, sedately moving with their own inner force or rhythm. Both paintings express a distilled and unearthly beauty, reminiscent of a mythical landscape conjured by Gustave Moreau, though fractured and emptied of narrative. At the same time, these are meditations on paint itself; each canvas a multivalent space for Ramsden to revel in the ambiguity and potential of her surfaces.Fascinated by how Bertolt Brecht would have his characters change costumes to foreground the drama’s illusory nature, Ramsden likewise conceives of different passages of paint as characters that might, with a simple shift of emphasis or the viewer’s perspective, become something new. The same section of a painting might evoke a stony field or a pool of dappled light, a cracked patch of ice or a window at night. Another touchstone for the artist is Robert Motherwell, who, like Ramsden, adapted many of his titles from poetry, and considered abstraction a kind of universal language capable of communicating both powerful emotions and complex thoughts.The exhibition will be accompanied by a booklet with an essay by novelist and essayist Daisy Hildyard and a poem by Danielle Wilde.Desire Line runs until 11th January 2025 and is now open at Pilar Corrias, on Savile Row, London. Free entry.Follow @MaryJRamsdenVisit: https://www.pilarcorrias.com/exhibitions/466-mary-ramsden-desire-line/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We meet Anya Gallaccio (b. 1963, Scotland), an artist renowned for her innovative use of organic, ephemeral materials – ranging from chocolate, ice, wax, apples, flowers and chalk – and for her explorations of transformation, change and impermanence. Throughout her practice, Gallaccio has significantly reshaped understandings of contemporary sculpture.Anya Gallaccio: preserve is her largest survey exhibition to date at Turner Contemporary, Margate. The exhibition spans three decades of Gallaccio’s radical practice, restaging several iconic sculptures in addition to a new site-specific commission. It reveals the artist’s consistent rethinking of the relationship between art and the environment by presenting works that connect with Kent’s natural heritage.Due to the temporal nature of her work, much of Gallaccio’s practice is best known through documentary photographs and memory. This exhibition introduces her sculptures and large-scale installations so that a new generation can engage in their references to environmental sustainability and preserving fragile ecosystems.Complementing Gallaccio’s exhibition, Turner Contemporary has developed an extensive school programme in partnership with the artist. This programme, titled An Apple a Day, aims to explore Kent’s countryside, heritage, and history through the lens of the apple and county’s apple orchards. Inspired by the work of Californian chef and food activist Alice Waters, Gallaccio seeks to embed nature across everyday teaching in primary schools.In collaboration with Kent Downs National Landscape, DEFRA and Lees Court Estate, this project underscores Turner Contemporary’s commitment to sustainability and celebrates the relationship between art, ecology, and agriculture in Kent. By engaging students with the rich heritage of the region’s apple orchards, the programme fosters a deeper appreciation for nature and promotes environmental stewardship from an early age.In the final room of the exhibition, the artist has installed a live 3D printer to extrude a mixture of chalk and porcelain over a series of weeks, gradually building the sculpture. The form it draws, in hexagonal lines, is a scaled-down version of a dene hole – a type of deep underground chamber. Prevalent in Kent, dene holes were hand-excavated and accessed by a narrow, vertical shaft. This printer operates once a day, during which it prints a single layer of the sculpture. Each layer must dry before the next is added the following day, continuing until the sculpture is complete. Anya Gallaccio: preserve runs until 26th January 2025 and is free to visit. Curated by Melissa Blanchflower, Senior Curator, Turner Contemporary.Visit: https://turnercontemporary.org/whats-on/anya-gallaccio-preserve/Follow @TurnerContemporaryThanks to @ThomasDaneGallery Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We meet artist Jesse Darling. His multi-disciplinary practice, of sculptures, drawings and objects, considers how bodily subjects are initially formed and continuously reformed through sociopolitical influences.Darling (b. Oxford, UK) draws on his own experience as well as the narratives of history and counter-history. He explores the inherent vulnerability of being a body, and how the inevitable mortality of living things translates to civilizations and structures. Featuring an array of free-floating consumer goods, support devices, liturgical objects, construction materials, fictional characters and mythical symbols, JD’s work recontextualizes manmade objects to reveal their precarity. Simultaneously wounded and liberated shapes outwardly bare their frailty and need for care and healing.Jesse Darling is an artist who writes, lives, and works. His research is concerned with the attempt to make visible the unconscious of European petro-colonial modernity through the history of technology and the production of ideology, or the objects and ideas with which we make up the world. In sculpture and installation he has taken up this enquiry using something like a materialist poetics to explore and reimagine the worldmaking values of that modernity. He is also interested in the role of spirituality as a structuring matrix for secular social life, and his practice takes seriously the idea that intuition, dreams, pathologies and folklore all have something important to tell us about the world. If there is a formal theme that runs through his work it is the acknowledgement of fallibility and fungibility as fundamental qualities in living beings, societies and technologies, which extends to the “mortal” quality of empires and ideas as a form of precarious optimism - nothing and no-one is too big to fail. Taking vulnerability and entanglement as a fact of life lends itself to a politics and a practice of community and coalition: Darling has been part of countless community-led projects and organizations and continues to research ways of being-with as praxis. Correspondence and dialogue form an important part of his research process.He has published many texts online and in print, including two chapbooks: VIRGINS, published by Monitor Books (2021), and SHOWGIRLS (Arcadia_Missa publishing, 2023, on the occasion of a Tate film commission for Site Visit). Selected solo exhibitions include Enclosures at Camden Arts Center (2022), No Medals No Ribbons at Modern Art Oxford (2022), Gravity Road at Kunstverein Freiburg (2022), Crevé at Triangle France Astérides (2019), and The Ballad of Saint Jerome at Tate Britain (2018—2019). Darling also participated in the 58th Venice Biennale, and was awarded the Turner Prize in 2023. In 2024, Jesse Darling became Associate Professor at the Ruskin and full-time Tutorial Fellow at St Anne's College.Follow https://bravenewwhat.org/@ArcadiaMissa, @GalerieSultana, @GalerieMolitor and @ChapterNYViist:https://arcadiamissa.com/jesse-darling/https://galeriesultana.com/artists/jesse-darling Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We meet Tom Rasmussen to explore their new album Live Wire. We discuss their love of art, collaborations with artists Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, Shon Faye and Travis Alabanza, their love for Rene Matić, writing new songs with Romy and Self Esteem and what it was like being photographed by the legendary Tim Walker on both album covers. This episode was recorded in Los Angeles while Tom put the final touches to the Live Wire album.“Live Wire (Globe Town Records 2024) was written over a year where the last thing I wanted to talk about was violence, or what it meant to be queer. I’ve done it so much, I wanted to think about and feel about what it meant if I could live beyond that. This album is about happinness, the bittersweetness time passing, trying to live when the world is falling down both inside and out. In terms of the production, we wanted to create songs where vastness and intimacy existed in the same place like on Body, Heart, Mind; or where there was so much space for the feelings of the listener — like on There’s A Lot To Be Happy About. Other songs like Song For M and Never Look Back, with Romy, are songs which start in a dream like space and aim never to take you out of it.”Tom's debut album Body Building (Globe Town Records 2023) fused dark dance music with an aesthetic and live performance that takes influence from their past life in drag. Born and raised in Lancashire, Tom moved to London where they fell into the world of drag, performing everywhere from the Royal Opera House to Glastonbury.Although their drag alter ego Crystal was distinct for singing live, it wasn’t until Rasmussen started writing their own music that their performance persona began to change, revealing more of themselves. Thus came their debut album Body Building, an album that pierces the skin with its falsetto vocals and moments of queer euphoria punctuated by acoustic instrumentation.Having already toured with Rina Sawayama and Self Esteem, Tom Rasmussen has already made waves with audiences across the UK. Especially with their single Dysphoria, the inimitably catchy, powerful yet poignant ode to their experience with their body.Follow @TomRasmussen on Instagram.Live Wire, is OUT NOW via Globe Town Records and includes collaborations with Romy and Self Esteeem.Listen here: https://open.spotify.com/album/2e2BL8KVYFFPve2vtCmO4l Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.