roma★
Cosmic Funnies
RMH
trying on a metaphor
oozey mess
Not today Justin
cherry valley forever
Kiana Khansmith
art blog(derogatory)
$LAYYYTER
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
titsay
Love Begins
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styofa doing anything
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noise dept.
Andulka
Misplaced Lens Cap
AnasAbdin
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@tom-isaacs
House Moves EOI
Steve McQueen, Deadpan, 1997. Film still. INTRO Hi there, As you may already be aware, I currently have the luxury of a beautiful (and spacious) studio space at Westward Cottage courtesy of the City of Ryde. One of my goals during this residency period (Oct 2025 – Oct 2026) is to take advantage of this space by hosting a variety of different artistic events. So far, Westward Cottage has…
Opening Étude, SEAWORLD VENICE - Florentina Holzinger
"Over the next hour, we heard an exquisite drone music concert played by an ensemble of nude women on the other barge. One of Holzinger’s performers held a guitar as she climbed up the enormous crane. A water ambulance rode by, just in case. The show had two climaxes. The first was the revelation of what had been hiding in the water. Lying dormant during the concert, and now being lifted out from underneath the surface, was a metal bell from which something hung upside down: a body. The whole time, Holzinger herself had been in the lagoon. At that moment—as she came out, silent, still, and naked—she seemed blue and lifeless. I wouldn’t have really put it past her to become unconscious as a form of extreme performance. Then, as the audience raised their phones, she began to pivot sideways inside the bell, so that it cast out its funereal tones across the water, ringing out back toward Giudecca and Saint Mark’s."
Untilled - Pierre Huyghe
"Pierre Huyghe’s contribution to dOCUMENTA (13) required some effort in order to be discovered at all. It was not just that Huyghe had chosen a decidedly decentered exhibition site: a composting facility located in the Aue-Park. Even after one had located the site, it was anything but obvious that it was art. Visitors found themselves in a kind of overgrown vacant lot: a pile of compost, sprouting growth, through which a walkway led, at times really just a beaten path, with algae-covered puddles. The hills were overgrown with plants and weeds. Off to one side, paving slabs were stacked; nearby, a mound of black chippings. An ant colony had formed at the foot of an oak. Even on closer inspection, it was unclear what had been altered artistically and what hadn’t, where the composting facility ended and the work of art began. "There was something like a center of the work: a reclining concrete figure placed in an open space in the middle of the lot—a replica of a work by the sculptor Max Weber from the 1930s, which on its shoulders had, in lieu of a head, a beehive populated by a trembling, buzzing swarm of bees. And there was the elegant white female greyhound, Human, which, with its pink leg, became a trademark of this documenta. Other elements of the work became apparent over time: the compost hills were planted with psychotropic, medical, and aphrodisiacal plants such as deadly nightshade and angel’s trumpets. Cannabis was also there, as well as rye, which is itself a completely harmless grain but is particularly likely to harbor ergot, a fungus that can be used to synthesize LSD. At some point, visitors began to sense that the stacked sidewalk slabs were arranged in a particular way, as was the surrounding basin, in which tadpoles splashed. Huyghe had collected several artifacts—he calls them “markers”—from various times and contexts. The stacked sidewalk slabs, for example, recalled the form and materials of Minimal Art, while a felled tree alluded to Robert Smithson’s Dead Tree of 1969. A bench, tipped over and resting between the stone slabs, was part of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s installation at Documenta11 and a small, desiccated oak lying around was part of Joseph Beuys 7000 Eichen (7,000 Oaks), his contribution to documenta 7 (1982). Some of these markers were more obvious; others were, if it all, recognizable as such only with the help of a drawing by the artist published in the short guide. The latter included various physical adaptations of functional elements from literary texts. Supposedly, there was a turtle walking around the composting facility that was borrowed from Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours (Against the Grain). And the young man who was nearly always present, in order to take care of the dog and the plants, personified with his constantly repeated, always identical actions a reference to the living dead in the garden of Raymond Roussel’s fantastic novel Locus Solus." (source)
New Workshop Series: How it feels
Hi everyone, As part of my residency with the City of Ryde, I’ll be delivering a series of free workshops for people of all ages and skill levels. How It Feels is a hands-on creative workshop series that invites the community to explore emotion through making. Guided by artist Tom Isaacs, resident artist for the City of Ryde, participants will create an original textile artwork that expresses a…
Westward Cottagecore
Hi everyone, I hope you’re all well! I have been busily working away at a number of different things recently. Today I’d like to share a few of the things that I’ve been doing. How it feels Each Monday and Tueday afternoon, during my open hours at Westward Cottage, I’ve been giving myself two hours to create a new textile piece in a series that I’m calling How it feels. This is a bit of an…
Helena Almeida (1934 - 2018), Untitled, 1996
... the artist found in photography a means of overcoming the exteriority of painting, and of allowing “being” and “doing” to coexist in the same medium, “as if I were continuing to affirm: my painting is my body, my work is my body.”
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The White Cube - Ilya & Emilia Kabakov
"In the exhibition hall, preferably in a rather crowded pavilion, stands a white cube that is 2.8 meters tall. Each wall has a width of 3 meters. The surface of the cube is very smooth, shiny, and is covered with white enamel. "There are ladders on two sides of the cube, the last landing of which is at a height of 1.76 meters so that the viewer might ascend and stand there. On the top surface of the cube, right in the center, there is a small piece of paper with a text: ‘Everyplace we were it smelled strongly of oil.’" [...] "The white cube by the end of the century had taken its place next to the Black Square, a symbol of modern art, a nominal concept and image that found its reflection in the architecture of the Bauhaus and in American Minimalism. "In the installation proposed here, this cube functions as a paraphrase of this idea as the very same white space, only turned inside out and placed askance inside the museum, as a ridiculous object.
Grief + Love
Please join us for an evening of poetry celebrating grief and love. With feature poets, and an open mic for you to share your own stories, this will be a forum for yarning and laughing and crying together. Bring your fondest memories and your sharpest hurts. This evening is hosted by City of Ryde Artist-in-Residence, Tom Isaacs, and Gadigal-based poet Jeremiah Gooseberrye. Tom and Jeremiah…
Homage to Malcolm - Jack Whitten
blp - Richard Artschwager
"From the outset of his creative career, Richard Artschwager stated that he wanted to make ‘useless objects’—art that would generate visual and physical encounters in real time and a shared space. For sixty years, he produced paintings, sculptures and drawings that subvert our perception of everyday life and objects, by taking the familiar and making it unusual.
"In 1967-1968, the artist began work on a series of pieces for which he would eventually become famous, the 'blps' (pronounced ‘blip’). These oblong shapes, often black, were to be found scattered on the walls of museums and galleries, and in public spaces. Building on Artschwager’s exploration of punctuation, the 'blps' are periods that have been 'accidentally or deliberately elongated'. A black punctuation mark that strangely appears not to actually punctuate any sentence, the 'blp' enriched his discoveries of the artistic potential of new industrial materials such as Formica and Celotex.
"The artist created breathing spaces, non-places that he placed into daily life, inviting the viewer to consider space as a semantic whole to be read by following a physical or mental pathway."
Single II – Louise Bourgeois
Sol LeWitt. Fold Piece, Sixteen Squares, 1972
Thursday Admin
Hi everyone! This is just a short blog post to highlight the success of my new ‘Thursday admin policy’. The admin goblin (me) has successfully uploaded two new pages today: Our Glorious Dead (2025) and ‘In the Flat Field’ (2024), my collaboration with Nuno Rodrigues de Sousa. If the admin goblin keeps going like this, he could even be our next employee of the month!
Nothing Can Ensure That We Will Meet Again - Cao Yu
"In this exhibition Cao explores gendered experiences of sexuality and motherhood; connections between life and the afterlife; links between species, and across aeons. Perhaps only in China, for example, could an artist procure a fossil from the Ice Age—a mammoth’s enormous leg bone unearthed in far north-eastern Heilongjiang Province—for an installation that examines profound human and post-human connections. In Nothing Can Ensure that We Will Meet Again (Ice Age - 2014), Cao Yu asks us to confront our deepest fears, and our deepest longings. She inserted the umbilical cord that once attached her to her firstborn child, frozen since 2014 for this precise purpose, into a space dug out of the bone and filled with resin. "Inlaid and preserved like a prehistoric insect trapped in amber, the knotted cord will survive long past Cao’s own life span, and her son’s. It is a time capsule illustrating the powerful connection between a mother and her infant, but also a reminder of their inevitable separation and mortality." (source)
Intestines - David Shrigley
Josef Albers - Gate, 1936.
November News
Hi everyone, The first month in Westward Cottage has already flown by! Since my last post, I’ve spent a bit of time moving my things over (with help from Jenna, Chloe and Eddy) and then settling into the studio: Now that I’m more-or-less settled in, I’ve resumed work on my latest project. For the first stage of this project, I’m developing a new textile artwork, drawing partial inspiration…
