Gemma Tipton

1 week 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.

2 weeks 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.

2 weeks 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.

3 weeks ago | irishtimes.com | Gemma Tipton

Those Passions: On Art and Politics Author: TJ Clark ISBN-13: 978-0500025260Publisher: Thames & HudsonGuideline Price: £40Writing about art and politics is, according to TJ Clark, “hell to do”. The acclaimed art historian certainly makes reading about them hard at times. So is it worth persisting with his latest doorstopper of a tome? Those Passions is an essay collection, many of which were published in the Times Literary Supplement over the past 25 years. That timespan is important.

4 weeks ago | irishtimes.com | Gemma Tipton

There are so many myths about how successful artists live and work. Almost all of them are entirely untrue. That lone genius conjuring up something glorious from a fever dream in his chilly garret? He’s more likely to be stuck in the supermarket queue. The fabulous phenomenon, plucked from obscurity to international fame by a billionaire patron? She will have been working away on group shows, solo shows, hope and rejection for years before becoming an overnight sensation.