Tag Archives: Creativity

Richard Paton: Exploring Magnetism as a Metaphor for Humanity’s Disconnect with Nature.

As one of the four fundamental forces in physics it has been harnessed to shape our modern world of electronics and how we interact with each other. For the last four years Fine Artist Richard Paton has explored various enigmatic aspects of magnetism and completed an MA in Art & Science at UAL in 2020. By researching Geomagnetism and Magneto Reception Paton’s artwork looks at how magnetism can be seen as a metaphor revealing a fundamental human disconnection with the earth itself and the animal’s which inhabit the natural world.
In recent pieces he tackles some of the most pressing issues of our times such as habitat degradation and species extinction which draw upon the evolution of the compass, mechanical automata and interactive electronics.

Jason deCaires Taylor’s Underwater BioCulture Sculpture at the Museo Atlantico, Lanzarote Island

A leading figure in art and ecology, John K. Grande is author of a range of books that include ‘Balance: Art and Nature’ and ‘Art Space Ecology’. In this article he discusses the work of sculptor and environmentalist, Jason deCaires Taylor, in particular his major project Museo Atlantico, a collection over 300 submerged sculptures and architectural forms in Lanzarote, Spain, the first of its kind in European waters. His pioneering public art projects are not only examples of successful marine conservation, but works of art that seek to encourage environmental awareness, instigate social change and lead us to appreciate the breathtaking natural beauty of the underwater world.

A theatre project explores collective solutions to saving the ocean

Dr Kira Erwin is an urban sociologist and senior researcher, at the Urban Futures Centre at the Durban University of Technology. Her research and publications focus largely on race, racialisation, racism and anti-racism work within the urban context. Her past projects explore narratives of home and belonging within the context of migration, gender and inclusion; as well as state delivered housing projects in the city. She is currently working on Lalela uLwandle with a team of researchers and civil society organisations to think through how people’s economic, spiritual, scientific and symbolic meanings of the sea should be part of ocean governance decisions. Her projects make use of creative participatory methods, and she collaborates with colleagues in various creative fields to produce forms of public storytelling that extend research beyond the walls of academia.

Washed Up

Alejandro Durán collects the international trash washing up on the Caribbean coast of Mexico and transforms it into aesthetic yet disquieting art works that wake us to the threat of plastic pollution. Through photography and installation, his long-term project “Washed Up: Transforming a Trashed Landscape” examines the fraught intersections of man and nature, revealing the pervasive impact of consumer culture on the natural world. He also engages audiences through community-based environmental art-making and speaking engagements.

WHAT GOD IS. (WITHOUT THE WOO WOO) and NEW EDEN

“Humans in their desire for answers to life’s most pressing questions have creatively reimagined and transformed God over the ages to fit their needs, values and beliefs. Despite all of the diversity and complexity ascribed to the thousands of variations of God, there seems to be room for one more. The true picture of God may not be supernatural, meta-physical or even metaphorical, but a creative force that may be as old as life in the Universe.”

Steve Sangapore is an American contemporary oil painter. Using vastly different stylistic approaches with various series’, his work can be described as an amalgamation of realism, surrealism and abstraction with thematic focuses on the human condition.

Abstraction, the Ether, and the Fourth Dimension: Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich in Context

Linda Dalrymple Henderson is the David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professor in Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research and teaching focus on modern art in its broader cultural context, including ideas such as ‘the fourth dimension,’ the history of science and technology, and mystical and occult philosophies. In addition to over eighty journal articles and book and catalog essays, she is the author of ‘The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art’ (Princeton University Press, 1983; new, enlarged ed., MIT Press, 2013) and ‘Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works’ (Princeton, 1998).In 2014 Professor Henderson won a Lifetime Achievement Award, given by the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. In 2018 she received a Leonardo Pioneer Award, given by the journal Leonardo on its 50th Anniversary.

Flesh and the Angels

A meditation on creativity in life, art and psychotherapy, its expression as a phenomenology of bursting, and the challenge of keeping going, with John Coltrane, Rainer Maria Rilke and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as companions.

Derek Bean is a practising Existential-Phenomenological Psychotherapist and registered member of the UK Council for Psychotherapy.