This is the second half of the keynote presentation I gave to the DeathWrites RSE network at Glasgow University. Click here to read Part One. We left off thinking about how the objects we use and live with are actually nodes in a vast web of connections, ideas,...
I was recently invited to give a keynote presentation at Glasgow University, for the research network DeathWrites. Co-ordinated by Dr Amy Shea, Dr Elizabeth Reeder, and Dr Naomi Richards, the project aims to develop and support a network of Scotland-based writers from...
Last week I was invited by an old friend, the artist Nina Pope, to join an online Zoom conversation with a long-standing discussion group of artists she has been part of for twenty years. It was a real pleasure to gather with artists who are based all over the...
…A musical composition does the same for listening. Art is a summoning of attention. To create it requires the highest directed focus, as does experiencing it. So writes Sven Birkerts in his essay ‘Attending the dragonfly’, one of the essays...
A few years ago we received this beautiful hand-printed letterpress Christmas card from Carol Dunbar, an artist friend here in Orkney, with just a single word on the front, in emphatic, berry-red letters pressed deeply into the thick paper. Ever since then the...
