Earth, Moon, Bread, and Bondage Pants
Welcome to your first edition of Signified for 2023
Art is a great talking point. Why not start a conversation by forwarding this newsletter to someone you know who shares your love of art?
Announcing the February exhibition at : six : shot : gallery
Remy Dean on ‘The Asemic Terrain’
I have this idea that our living landscapes are already poems written in a language of minerals, chemical processes, and ongoing energy exchanges. It is an unfinished epic poem, already spanning billions of years but with a fractal metre of minutes, months, millennia… land stanzas spanning portions of our perceptive interaction through the lens of living…
Continue reading and see the art at : six : shot : gallery
Recently published in Signifier:
The Bread is the Life
Bread has appeared in art ever since the agrarian civilisations which relied upon grain as a staple food have existed. There is an Egyptian hieroglyph, a simple semi-circle, that depicts bread, and this symbol went on to have a variety of meanings — feminine, offering — depending on context. Bread’s importance for survival meant it also symbolised spiritual sustenance, especially in Christian services re-enacting the last supper…
Westwood Bound
Obscene to the crude, sophisticated to the refined, Dame Vivienne Westwood is remembered as one of the boldest proponents of the Punk aesthetic. Her political T-shirts — featuring provocative slogans, crucifixes collaged with swastikas, gay cowboys, satanic union flags, ripped up royalty, and the like — were sure to amuse your friends and antagonize your enemies. As a bonus, you could get yourself arrested just for strutting down the street in one.…
Neon Lights and Moon Shadows
A fascination with light runs through the career of artist Cerith Wyn Evans since he started out making art films in collaboration with Derek Jarman during the early 1980s. But, for me, his work first came to light when I started teaching experimental photography and lens-based media around the turn of the millennia. I recall his ingenious photograph taken in Munich during the 1999 solar eclipse. It became a perennial image…
This Island, Earth
With the splashdown of the Orion spacecraft on 12 December 2022, the Artemis 1 mission concluded successfully. heralding a new Moon Age. More than half a century ago, on 24 December 1968, the Apollo 8 mission’s CSM-103 spacecraft had orbited the Moon and its three astronauts — Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders — had become the first humans to travel beyond the Moon and witness an Earthrise…
Did you see our January exhibition at : six : shot : gallery?
Jonathan Meades on ‘Treyfs and Artknacks’
I take photographs fairly obsessively and I do paint a bit. I started taking photographs in car washes, as one does. You get extraordinary effects. Then I started putting liquids of different colours and viscosity into plastic bags and taking photographs of that. Looking at surfaces and making things… so it is all representational but looks like instant abstract…
Continue reading and see the art at : six : shot : gallery
Empty Wigs, the latest novel by Jonathan Meades is currently crowdfunding at Unbound.
New Year & New Beginnings: from the archives of Signifier
In this regular feature of our Signified Newsletter, we select a few choice articles from our archives linked by a monthly theme. For our first newsletter of New Year, we focus on the beginning of art and the dawn of civilisation…
Prehistoric Graffiti?
The Chauvet Caves, in France, contain excellent early examples of prehistoric ‘parietal art’, which is a term for wall paintings and murals. The paintings were made and added to over a long period from 28,000, perhaps earlier, to 17,000 BCE. They still have aesthetic value today, having a lovely sense of line. They are clear and very well observed, mainly depicting animals.…
The Three Mothers
The earliest piece of art, so far discovered relatively in tact, is known as the Venus of Hohle Fels and is made of ivory, carved to resemble a very well-endowed female figure. It is a small statuette, measuring only about six centimetres, but with proportionally huge breasts, belly, thighs and genitalia, whilst the head is reduced to little more than a nub.…
The Ascent of Civilisation
Göbekli Tepe, near the Euphrates in South Eastern Turkey, is an extensive complex of megalithic stone circles. These are possibly the first temples ever built. The culture responsible for their construction also initiated agriculture and the domestication of animals, apparently to feed the workforce engaged in building these temples and then the worshippers who came to use them…
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Our Redbubble online store has launched with its first three collections of artistically taste-tested objet and there’s even a button badge of our distinctive Signifier/Signified dynamic diagram for all you media theorists and students of semiotics! The choice is yours, simply click here to browse the collections in our store — all profits go directly to our writers.
If you know anyone who enjoys reading “imaginative fiction at its best”, you can further support our editor and curator by recommending or purchasing their latest novels in the series, This, That, and The Other, written by Remy Dean with Zel Cariad and published by The Red Sparrow Press.
“…will be enjoyed by fans of fantasy of all ages, particularly those who like classics, like the ‘Narnia’ saga.”
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