Visual arts
fisun.guner
Do you think you could identify the range of facial expressions worn by Eleanor Crook’s strangely animated wax figure models? A glimmer of a woozy, lopsided grin, perhaps? The suggestion of a drunken leer? Possibly not, for the repertoire of facial expressions she gives her subjects – which are, in fact, the products of painstaking observation – are not, she explains, found amongst the living, but are unique to the dead.Working in wax and other life-like media, Crook has made anatomical and pathological sculptures for the Science Museum, The Royal College of Surgeons and the Gordon Museum of Read more ...
David Nice
It would be hard to say which was the more breathtaking: a sunny autumn morning walk around the woody-banked loop of the River Wear, looking up at Durham’s monumental Norman cathedral from every perspective, or seeing the great edifice illuminated the previous evening with pages of the Lindisfarne Gospel, centerpiece of the city’s LUMIERE festival. For dynamic outdoor art to rival one of the world’s most spectacular natural-urban scenes is quite something; for the citizens, who must almost take Durham’s hilly location for granted, the festival offers a bewitching chance to renew a sense of Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Until recently, on YouTube, you could watch Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley’s Heidi (1992), one of the funniest and most transgressive videos ever made. In a Swiss chalet, the children Heidi and Peter are being “educated” by their abusive grandfather, who freely indulges his propensity for bestiality, incest, onanism and scopophilia. Played out with the help of masks, inflatable dolls and numerous props, life in this dysfunctional family reveals both childhood innocence and parental responsibility to be a myth. Recently, though, even a cleaned-up version of this black comedy has been deemed too Read more ...