Tag: travel

  • The Spotify playlist

    Each week a playlist of audio is curated to go alongside the articles on the blog. There is always a link with the articles although sometimes it is less obvious than others. To listen click on the player above or go to Spotify and search for “Music to read a blog by”. Paying subscribers to…

  • Rohit Bal

    The Indian fashion designer, Rohit Bal, known for his innovative blending of the sub-continent’s cultural heritage with contemporary design, has died. Bal credited his early childhood experiences of his mother’s shawls and saris with his success, saying that “Fabric is the… lifeblood of fashion”, and his understanding of materials and techniques resulted in a label…

  • A note about photos on the blog

    Over the past few years I have been very conscious that photographs convey a lot more than words but that has presented a moral dilemma. These days when images are an ever-present part of our daily lives it is easy to find something on the Web to use as an illustration for an article. In…

  • The forest that penned a song

    A legal bid has proposed that an Ecuadorean forest be recognised as the co-creator of a song, a moral ownership that could help save it. The petition, initiated by the More Than Human Life (Moth) Project, is going to submitted to the country’s copyright office that will ask for Los Cedros cloud forest to be…

  • Living the ancient high life

    A recent and surprising discovery has been uncovered in the high altitudes of Uzbekistan’s southeastern mountains. The region was long thought to have been uninhabited because of the problems with living at such altitudes but this discovery, made using lidar, the remote sending technology that uses reflected light to map out surroundings in three dimensions,…

  • So she was turned to a pillar of salt

    Jo Rogge, an artist who lives between South Africa and Namibia, is non-binary and creates work that comments and highlights social issues that they have experienced. In this show, just ended in Windhoek’s “The Project Room” in Namibia, Rogge’s repurposed textiles take their place alongside visual art. The textiles are found pieces that have been…

  • The Spotify playlist

    Each week a selection of music is curated to go along with the blog. The playlist can be heard on the player above or by heading over to Spotify and searching for “Music to read a blog by”. The selections have something to do with the entries on the blog. Depending on the listener’s subscription…

  • Aboriginal art in New York

    Aboriginal art celebrates the land, for it is through painting, singing and dancing that the land can express and become itself. A show in New York’s Asia Society of seventy-four pieces includes video to provide a context to the beautiful artwork – bark paintings (not all on bark) – on display until January 2025. Seventy-four…

  • Hawaiian quilts and island ecology

    A new book has just been published by Common Threads that explores fifteen contemporary quilts and their relationship to the ecology of Hawai’i. Marenka Thompson-Odlum, a Research Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford leads a project to enhance the Museum’s collections, commission new work and develop relationships with communities represented in the…

  • CuzyT

    The recent trip to the Costume and Textile Association of Aotearoa New Zealand symposium in Whangārei included a surprising discovery. The North of the North Island/ Te Ika-a-Māui is home to Tāne Mahuta, the giant kauri tree. To get to it from the East Coast one travels across the island on a meandering road that…