STEPHANIE BROWN draws attention to the hidden labour of the female embroiderers, and how a 19th century replica made no such error
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Glimpses of social experience
EXPLORATION: Girl and Fryed
[Ian Currie]
MIK SABIERS revels in a band that ploughs an idiosyncratic furrow of expletive laden, guitar-driven alt rock
ANDY HEDGECOCK, MARIA DUARTE and ANGUS REID review Synthetic Sincerity, Our Hero, Balthazar, Heartstopper Forever, and A Year In London
The bard invites readers to a gig, raps for Clacton, and lays out the Burnham-Hurzeler conundrum
RON JACOBS recommends an important book that enhances the oppositional theories put forth by Fanon and, in doing so, remakes psychology itself
JAN WOOLF relishes an extensive history of our long relationship to trees in Britain that underlines the current emergency
DIANE WATT argues that while evidence of sex is not there, a 16th‑century lesbian poet could be Scotland’s answer to Gentleman Jack
A Sense of Exposure (photography by Ian Currie)
The Hive Coffee House
Blackpool
AS the Hive opened its doors for A Sense of Exposure, a drummer called Busking Joe began a spirited performance on the pavement outside. The controlled but restless clatter provided an apt soundtrack to this exhibition of Ian Currie’s photographs.
Currie’s arresting images, as stylistically diverse as Joe’s grooves, were presented in four sets, each exploiting a phenomenon well established in neuroscience – the tendency of the brain to impose order and meaning on visual information.
In Surface Textures, Hidden Depths, a collection of abstractions based on everyday features and objects, there are competing hints of the organic and manufactured. At times, the weirdly decorative gives way to impressions of human anatomy, seething lava and looming monsters in dense, menacing oceans.
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SIMON PARSONS applauds an artist who rescues and rehumanises stories of women, the victims of violence, from a feminist perspective
MARY CONWAY becomes impatient with the intellectual self-indulgence of Tom Stoppard in a production that is, nevertheless, total class