Book Review of Art is a Tyrant: The Unconventional Life of Rosa Bonheur, by Catherine Hewitt

10/06/20

Published in the summer 2020 issue of Art Quarterly

Book Review of The Art of Looking Up by Catherine McCormack

23/03/20

Published in the spring 2020 issue of Art Quarterly

Book Review: Bacon and the Mind: Art, Neuroscience and Psychology

12/10/19
Book Review: Bacon and the Mind: Art, Neuroscience and Psychology

Published in the autumn 2019 issue of Art Quarterly

Book review: Drawing in Tintoretto's Venice

05/06/19

Published in the summer 2019 issue of Art Quarterly

Book Review: Klimt & Rodin: An Artistic Encounter

14/04/18
Book Review: Klimt & Rodin: An Artistic Encounter

Published in the spring 2018 issue of Art Quarterly

Book review of Firecrackers: Female Photographers Now

30/11/17

Book review of Firecrackers: Female Photographers Now

By Fiona Rogers & Max Houghton

Published by Thames & Hudson

There has been no shortage of books on female photographers appearing over recent months, so what does this compendium, published by Thames & Hudson this autumn, add to the library that its predecessors haven’t already provided? Certainly many of the artists included have been represented elsewhere, and some of the images are beginning to feel a little overly familiar – but, in a world where Helmut Newton’s vampy erotica or Robert Doisneau’s iconic Le Baiser de l’Hôtel de Ville (1950) are recognisable in the flash of an eye, why shouldn’t Juno Calypso’s saccharine pink Honeymoon series nymphets (2015-16) and Natasha Caruana’s faceless brides (Fairytale for Sale series, 2011) be just as familiar and ubiquitous?

Read the full review here

Book Review of Girl on Girl. Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze

11/05/17

Girl on Girl. Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze.

By Charlotte Jansen

Hardback, 192 pages

ISBN 9781780679556

Published by Laurence King Publishing

£19.99 retail

“We see photographs of women every day, but we are used to looking at them in a few specific contexts,” writes editor Charlotte Jansen, in the introduction to her new book, Girl on Girl. Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze. “On products and billboards, in shop windows and magazine covers, in erotica and pornography.” The premise behind the book, however, is that there is a rapidly growing number of women out there photographing women, creating images where both the subject and the “gaze” are female. “At times,” Jansen continues, “there seems to be little difference between how women photograph women and how men photograph women, but women have the right to self-objectify and to exploit without critique, just as men have been allowed to do since the earliest forms of art emerged”. And here, Jansen offers 40 international female photographers the opportunity to present their work, their aims and their motivations neutrally and without critique, albeit opening themselves up for critical response.

Read the full review here

Book Review of Tulip by Celine Marchbank

04/05/16

Tulip

By Celine Marchbank

Hardback, 152 pages

ISBN 978-1-907893-87-2

Published by Dewi Lewis Publishing

Since the age of 16, my room has scarcely ever been without a vase of flowers. It began when I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Throughout my treatment – even when I was in an isolation ward and not allowed them – people would send me beautiful bouquets. Their vivid colours and sweet scents cheered up the room, but, as they began to fade, the omen of impending death became too prescient and they had to be replaced by fresh specimens, full of life and renewed hope. And so the cycle goes on. 20 years later. I survived. The flowers die, but new ones take their place and accompany me on my journey.

For Sue Miles, flowers also played a significant role in her cancer journey. Unfortunately, unlike me, she did not survive. Her stage 4 lung cancer had already spread throughout her body by the time of diagnosis. But her daughter, documentary photographer Celine Marchbank, made it her project – their shared project, in fact – to capture on camera the last years of Sue’s life. An edited compilation has now been published by Dewi Lewis Publishing as the beautiful visual memoir, Tulip. “This was obviously a very painful time for me, but I always felt it was important to record it in some way,” writes Marchbank in the foreword. “I’m a documentary photographer after all and so, more than ever, I felt the need to record everything, like some kind of magpie collecting thoughts and moments rather than shiny things.”

Read the full review here

Book Reviews: Louise Bourgeois and two primers on Contemporary Art

16/12/15

Book Reviews

Contemporary Art in the United Kingdom (Black Dog Publishing)

Book Review: Art & Visual Culture: A Reader (Tate Publishing)

Book Review: Mumbling Beauty: Louise Bourgeois, ed Alex van Gelder

Published in issue 19 (winter 2015/16) of F22 magazine

Book review of Understanding Stanley – Looking through Autism by Rosie Barnes

05/10/15

Understanding Stanley – Looking through Autism

By Rosie Barnes

Softback, 112pp

ISBN 978-0-9929521-0-5

Published by Lampshade Books

Retail Price: £15

‘If someone asks you if you know what the time is, do you answer simply “yes”?’

‘Is it important and easy for you to remember the registration numbers of all the taxis you’ve caught in the past year?’

‘Can you imagine your life being like this?’

These questions are just some of those raised in Rosie Barnes’ book, Understanding Stanley – Looking through Autism, a heart-warming – and, at times, -wrenching – insight into life with – and as – her son, Stanley, who was diagnosed with autism aged three and a half. As a photographer, Barnes realised that, to understand things that are not immediately within your grasp, sometimes words are not where you need to begin. Her motivation for producing this book was to ‘create a new kind of visual language that can really get under the skin of what it might feel like to be autistic with not much effort needed on behalf of the reader’. She is clear that ‘this is not a “what to do” book. It’s a “what it might feel like” book’. How is it possible to make people aware – and accepting – of something so complex and difficult to explain, let alone see?

Read the full review here

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