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Art in the Time of Coronavirus
By Zara Kesterton (@ZaraKesterton) 15 March 2020: we were beginning to realise just how much of an impact the coronavirus pandemic would have on all our lives. One of my friends messaged a group chat, ‘Now that we aren’t allowed to touch anything ever again does it spell the end of material culture? Is the…
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The Abyss of Recipes
Cassell’s Cyclopaedia of Mechanics and William Kentridge’s Second-Hand Reading By Xinyi Wen (@HPSWarburgian) Artist William Kentridge told an anecdote when talking about his video artwork Second-Hand Reading (2013). Once Kentridge asked someone what a common friend of theirs was doing and received the answer ‘busy making a tree-search’. A confusing term as it is, ‘tree-search’ triggered Kentridge’s imagination – one has…
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10. A Portrait of Dr Charles Russell
By Shea Hendry Prior to the American Revolution, Dr Charles Russell of Massachusetts owned a thriving medical practice in Charlestown and a sprawling country estate just south of Concord. Direct evidence of Dr Russell’s political leanings is fragmentary prior to the British Army’s ill-fated march into Lexington on April 19, 1775, though as his obituary…
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13. Lady Harriet Acland, the American War of Independence, and Tales of Female Heroism
By Molly Groarke This 1784 painting by Robert Pollard depicts a scene from the American War of Independence, shortly after the Battles of Saratoga in 1777. The British forces had been defeated and one of their officers, Colonel John Dyke Acland, had been wounded and captured. In the painting, his wife Lady Harriet Acland, who…
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Reflections on an Unstitched Coif
by Zara Kesterton, @ZaraKesterton Toni Bucky came across T.844–1974 in the Victoria and Albert Museum during her PhD research into blackwork embroidery. She was hunting for evidence of the geometric stitching, usually completed in black thread on linen, which became popular in England during the sixteenth century. In the V&A collections, Toni found an unstitched…
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