Category: Travel

  • Technology

    Technology

    This week’s blog entries are all to do with technology. From the rise of the computer to AI, we are surrounded by technology. Some of it is useful, some is harmful. Some helps us to be more, and some has the potential to disrupt our lives and lessen them. So this week I have decided…

  • The tracks on Spotify

    The audio this week on the playlist features these tracks. The Cunning Little Vixen by Leoš Janáček This well-loved opera in Czech started out as a newspaper comic strip before becoming a staple of the operatic stage. The allegorical story follows Vixen Sharp Ears as she loves and lures her way through life in the…

  • The Spotify playlist

    Each week a playlist is curated on the Spotify platform for readers to listen to while browsing the blog. The tracks on the playlist have something to do with the blog entries, sometimes obviously and sometimes less so. To listen, click on the player above or head over to Spotify where you can search for…

  • Iceland and the poetry of weaving

    The Nordic nation of Iceland sits on the Mid Atlantic Ridge, midway between Europe and North America. Wild, windswept, beautiful, bleak and filled with fire and ice, the country is a romantic’s dream, an island of Vikings and sagas,… and art. While the music of Iceland is well-known, and it boasts a fine pedigree in…

  • Conversation and Cloth

    The next in the series of Conversation and Cloth talks will be on the 6th December 2024 at 10am in the Regent Theatre Cafe in Greymouth Māwhera. After a hiatus of a few months while the studios in Shetland were being sorted out and the new studios in Greymouth have been getting underway, the series…

  • Timelines

    Myriam Dion’s work, currently on show in New York, uses repurposed paper and ephemera to tell stories about women. In this exhibition, the artist has used paper to explore and highlight the rights of women and those who have fought for them. Cutting newspapers, reports, handmade papers, textile designs and photographs and weaving them together…

  • Rise Kagona

    Back in the 1980s as the world awakened to what we now know as “world music” the sounds of the Bhundu Boys made centerstage. The band were Zimbabwe’s biggest export with a unique sound and energy, and one its founders passed away in September: Rise Kagona. In 1980, Rhodesia became Zimbabwe after the Independence War,…

  • This week’s Spotify playlist

    Each week a playlist of audio is compiled and curated to go with the articles in the blog. The tracks have something to do with the blog entries and you can read about the links in a separate article on the blog. To listen to the playlist click on the player above or head over…

  • DY Begay’s Sublime Light

    The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian is currently hosting a show of tapestries by fibre artist DY Begay. In these works the artist explores her birthplace and home of Tsélaní on the Navajo Nation reservation through beautifully rendered land and skyscape interpretations in colour and texture. Sublime Light is on until July 13th…

  • The spectacular art of Khatija Possum

    The third generation of painters in her family, Khatija Possum is the granddaughter of Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, a founding artist of the contemporary indigenous art movement in Australia. The artist uses Aboriginal ancestry as influences in her work, portraying the landscape through concentric circles that represent human activity, small dots and circles standing in for…