Tag: craft

  • This week’s Spotify playlist

    Each week a playlist is curated to reflect the items on the blog. Some are obviously connected and some are more obscure. To listen, click on the playlist above or search for “Music to read a blog by” on Spotify. Paid Spotify subscribers will be able to hear all the tracks in their entirety, uninterrupted…

  • Karen Lamonte

    Karen LaMonte has been exploring beauty, identity, gender and the natural world since 1990 through glass, ceramic, paper, bronze, iron and marble, sculpture and printmaking. Now based in Prague, in 2007 the American artist travelled to Japan where she studied the design, symbolism, construction and significance of kimono, turning those studies into ceramic, cast glass,…

  • Weaving music

    The Royal Academy of Art Summer Show is currently on in London and among the pieces on display is one that combines music and weaving. Following the death of her mother, Kate Davis began to weave music scores because words could not express her emotions adequately. The slow process of weaving allowed a sense of…

  • Midwinter on the Coast

    This is the first year we have spent almost all of the winter in Aotearoa New Zealand and what an experience! Having moved to Aotearoa from the UK (London and Shetland) two and a bit years ago, and, with the first winter being extremely mild and having been away last year for midwinter, our experience…

  • Matariki 2024

    Matariki is here! The Māori celebration of a new year is called Matariki, after the cluster of stars that is also known as The Pleiades. It is a time to be joyful because of the turn of the seasons but it is also a time to reflect and remember those who are no longer with…

  • Venice Biennale – Pavilions and Palazzos

    This final instalment of the recent trip to Venice for a couple of days of the art biennale focuses on the wider events in the city. Throughout Venice there are exhibitions, shows and performances as part of the Biennale. They are tucked into hidden corners, upstairs and down, inside purpose-built structures and centuries-old edifices. It…

  • Stars – a Conversation and Cloth event

    This coming week, on Wednesday 26th June, there will be a Conversation and Cloth event in Hokitika. At 5:30 in the library I will be talking about the stars, an appropriate topic for Matariki. I will have some of the stars of the collection, such as the one pictured below, with me and will present…

  • Venice and the Biennale – part two

    The Venice Biennale’s traditional site is the Giardini, public gardens created by Napoleon at the start of the 19th Century. The first years of the exhibition saw more than 200,000 people attend the venues and over the decades since buildings have been erected to house country pavilions, showcasing artists and ideas from around the globe,…

  • Hélène Kuhn Ferruzzi

    Venice has long been known for its music, art and artists. In the narrow route along a canal that leads past Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery of European and American art is a small shop with windows that tell of the artistic eye of Hélène Kuhn Ferruzzi. Enchanting and wondrous, this shop is a destination for the…

  • Venice and the Biennale (Part One)

    Taking place in the beautiful city of Venice with its picturesque canals, boats and bridges as well as its plethora of fine buildings, the Biennale 2024 is thought-provoking and surprising. Spread across the city, the main venues of the exhibition are the Arsenale and Giardini, the former a naval shipyard and the latter, as the…