John Ruskin: Artist And Observer, Edinburgh
John Ruskin has gone down in history for championing Turner’s landscapes, gothic-revival theorising and non-consummation of marriage to the beautiful 19-year-old Effie Gray. But this show of 130 drawings and watercolours shows Ruskin as a creative artist in his own right. For Ruskin, his painful sensitivity fluctuating constantly between periods of intellectual elation and lowdown despondency, drawing from nature became a means of minutely observing and reflecting upon his place in the world. Less concerned with making art for showing than with using art for seeing, his Rocks And Ferns In A Wood At Crossmount, Perthshire is an incisive piece of graphic observation that is razor-sharp and vivid.
Scottish National Portrait Gallery, to 28 Sep
RC
Open For Business, London
Last year, nine Magnum photographers travelled the length of Britain creating images that defied headlines about the UK’s ailing industries. Exploring everything from fabric to new energy, they’ve captured the many ways that makers have adapted to a changing world. Things in these images are never quite what you expect. The shipbuilders snapped by Chris Steele-Perkins create customised 72ft yachts, while Bruce Gilden’s portrait of a Tate & Lyle worker is sour rather than sweet. Mark Power focused on train-builders Bombardier, while Martin Parr captured an employee from Aardman’s animation studio, in a counter-intuitive look at the people who make the UK tick.
Science Museum, SW7, Fri to 2 Nov
SS
Scale + Ambition: AJ Small Projects, Bristol
The Architecture Journal’s Small Projects awards, celebrating architecture on a budget, prove you don’t need to be bigger than the rest to get attention. This year’s selection of photographs, drawings and models include canny solutions to architectural conundrums and ways to make the most of squeezed spaces. Duggan Morris’s floating cinema, for instance, is on a canal boat. Another stand-out floating abode is the Exbury Egg, a wooden, energy-efficient, egg-shaped art lab where artist Stephen Turner studies the river Beaulieu. This year’s prize, however, goes to Gillespie Yunnie Architects for their staircase linking Royal William Yard in Plymouth to a public park.
Architecture Centre, Wed to 21 Sep
SS
Bradford Beach, Bradford
The term “immersive exhibition” usually refers to installations that surround the audience with hi-tech multimedia environments, but Fuse Art Space’s use of the term refers to the fact they have filled the gallery with 11 tonnes of sand, waves of photo-images and sound recordings of the sea. The photographs, taken around the coast of UK with film and pinhole cameras, tend to be intimately sensuous in atmosphere. Most touching are Celia Jackson’s remembrances of her father’s fatal heart attack while floating on his back, gazing into a beautiful blue sky. To increase the oceanic mood, there are field recordings of whispering mussel beds by the likes of Jez Riley French and Lee Paterson.
Fuse Art Space, to 29 Sep
RC
Serpentine Park Nights: Forget Amnesia, London
Until October, Friday nights at the Serpentine Pavilion will feature music, film, talks and performances to keep your grey cells tingling and toes tapping. This week, the maestro of techno-producing sculptures and installations that use belly-shaking bass, Haroon Mirza, curates an evening featuring sound artist and electronica head Mark Fell, and the cult experimental cellist Okkyung Lee. Further Park Nights include Lina Lapelyte’s night of arias sung by an all-female choir (29 Aug); and a talk by leading consumer culture theorist, Zygmunt Bauman (19 Sep).
The Serpentine, W2, Fri
SS
Brothers In Art: John And Paul Nash, Bristol
Paul Nash is one of the great romantic visionaries of 20th-century British art. His paintings of rolling fields, hill forts and standing stones put him in a tradition of artists fascinated by ancient mysteries and magic that goes back to William Blake, while his modernist leanings come through in the use of abstract forms set against eerie, surreal plains. His brother John is a lesser-known figure, though as this show pairing the siblings’ work reveals, they had much in common. Both lived through two world wars and were fascinated by landscape. In John’s paintings of light breaking across Gloucestershire cornfields, he hovers on the brink of his brother’s more radical use of abstraction. His geometric corn sheaves and sunbeams, moody light and tight compositions make the rural idylls of an England marred by war hum with energy.
Royal West Of England Academy, to 14 Sep
SS
Simon & Tom Bloor, Sheffield
The idea that artistic experiment is innately playful and practically useless is nothing new, but the collaborative duo of Simon & Tom Bloor turn play itself into the overt focus of their artists’ residency as they transform the Site Gallery into a modernist-revival recreational area. Wielding abstract conjugations of concrete, polystyrene and whatever else comes to hand, the pair might appear to get indulgently light-hearted with their idea of creativity as “utopian freedom”. Yet Planning For Play involves a culturally sophisticated struggle, too, with considerable research conducted into the often questionable optimism of inner-city architectural regeneration projects.
Site Gallery, Tue to 20 Sep
RC
Walking Poets, Grasmere
The psychogeographic trend for wandering about urban wastelands in contemplative mood may have become commonplace, but here’s a show that demonstrates that contemporary artists are still taking to country rambling. Staged in Dove Cottage, the Wordsworths’ family home, Walking Poets is based on displays of manuscripts by English Romantics Dorothy and William Wordsworth and the 17th-century Confucian poet Matsuo Bashõ. William’s sublime text of The Prelude, transcribed by Mary, is set against some choice Bashõ haikus. (“The old pond. A frog jumps in: Plop!”) Bringing such ruminations on humankind’s relationship to nature up to date in our age of ecological concern is image and text work by a host of artists, including Mike Collier, Manny Ling and Christine Flint-Sato. They all share a faith in the soulful rejuvenation offered by a breath of fresh mountain air.
Dove Cottage, to 2 Nov
RC
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion