Gemma Tipton

3 weeks ago | irishtimes.com | Gemma Tipton

A pair of old-fashioned underpants, some carved marble, an early iteration of the iPod, a mirror of uncertain origin, some Lego. What makes an object valuable: scarcity, sentiment, the genius of the maker or the reputation of the owner? Sometimes it’s simply a question of presentation. Boutiques and museums understand the value of displaying something separately, on a velvet hanger, or spotlit on a plinth.

1 month ago | irishtimes.com | Gemma Tipton

Down on the shore along one arm of Kinsale’s sheltering harbour, the area known as Scilly was once a sleepy ramble of fishermen’s houses. A coastal path brings walkers from the Spaniard to the Bulman pubs. Between these lay the Spinnaker, a legendary restaurant run by the late singer and actor Hedli Anderson, who was married to poet Louis MacNeice for 17 years until 1959, and kitted out like the interior of a boat.

1 month ago | irishtimes.com | Gemma Tipton

Can art change the world? Are art centres and galleries about leisure or life? For Michael Kane the answer is definitely the latter. The artist once described in these pages as truculent and combative – at least back in the 1960s and 1970s – is these days a charming combination of formidably intelligent, intense and serious yet frequently mischievous. He is also quick to see the absurdities of some previous certainties. Maybe he has mellowed.

1 month ago | irishtimes.com | Gemma Tipton

I have been wrapped in seaweed, chocolate and mud, but not all at the same time. I have been pricked with tiny needles, abraded with lasers and had heavy brass bowls placed across my body and dinged with a soft mallet. Based on the global wellness industry, an alien visiting to gather intelligence for their home planet could get some seriously strange ideas about our practices. Now I’m in Girona, about to be cryogenically frozen.

1 month ago | irishtimes.com | Gemma Tipton

Julian Knox has been reading about prisons. “I was trying to find a language for the interior world,” he says. “I read about a test they did. Where there were prisoners that swear a lot, it was because they didn’t have a language for the things they were saying.” Born in Sierra Leone, the artist, who works as Julianknxx, fled the country’s civil war with his family in the 1990s, at the age of nine, finding a home in Gambia before arriving in London as a teenager.