Are you dead?

‘Are You Dead?’ is the latest exhibition in Nexus Art Café. Three contemporary taxidermists explore the relationship that we have with the animal kingdom. Disturbing, shocking and often high amusing this exhibition challenges our perceptions of the animal kingdom by placing them in an unexpected context.

Are You Dead?
Nexus Art Cafe
30th September - 1st November
Thursday 2nd October 7-10 with live music - all welcome

Susannah Gent has two pieces of work in the exhibition: ‘Sentimental Rabbit Suicide’ and ‘Shop Window’. Susannah does not use taxidermy to re-inject life into the creature but simply to present the it as dead. ‘Shop Window’ consists of several single sculptural taxidermy works drawing inspiration from a Victorian curiosity shop. The timeless ‘Sentimental Rabbit Suicide’ explores our relationship with the progression of generations using recycled matter from the food chain and house clearance.

Van Herrewege’s work is inspired by a fascination with the form and aesthetics of creatures from the Animal kingdom. He is interested in the juxtaposition of animals in unexpected contexts and how it affects our perception of them.

The recurrent characters of Luz Valencia’s work are birds, jellyfishes, insects, bacteria, tiny explosions of colors and lines that multiply across the surface in an obsessive way. Unstoppable and wanting to cover it all but limited to a designated areas assigned for them to live in , similar to the western social inhabitations, gentrified classes forced from abodes to scratch around in the deluge of structures.

There's no place like home

David Foster Wallace on unconscious worship

David Foster Wallace's posthumous piece in today's Grauniad shows how much poorer we all are without him.

It's almost as if he's been a member of Sanctus1 for the past five years:

A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.

Did I hear a shiver of recognition? And he captures in a nutshell that giddy feeling I sometimes get when I'm in a queue, my imagination's sparking, and the air is rich with fireworks:

It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.

And the irony, the painful irony of his closing comments. Read the article in full here.

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God on trial

If you didn't see "God on Trial" on the BBCthis week, then try to catch it on BBC iPlayer if you can. I hope you can, because this is really worth seeing. But not fun.

God On Trial takes as a starting point the story that prisoners in Auschwitz, their faith tested by their suffering and the barbarity of the Nazis, put God on trial. It's emotionally strong, and (not to understate anything) somewhat challenging to anyone, whether or not they have a belief in a just God.

The scene where Anthony Sher describes God as "not good, but He was on our side" during the ... less savoury parts of what we Christians call the Pentateuch is particulary challenging. God called for the destruction of the Amalechites, the Moabites: why should He not call for the destruction of the Jews? Or, maybe now, the Christians?

There can be no happy ending here, but they do manage a moment of great compassion and a declaration of faith: "now that we have declared God guilty, what can we do?" "We pray".

Jesus ska

Good morning!

Whatever happened to the Art work on Afflecks?

I was showing some aussie visitors around the Northern Quarter yesterday and took then to Afflecks Palace. I was just about to point out the mosiac below and it was gone...who has stolen it? Has it been moved? Can anyone enlighten me?

My GB in four photos

Cloisters roof in Gloucester cathedral


Seth Lakeman playing to a pretty damp squib crowd. Love him!


A typical tent view... washing up, grey clouds, some blue sky and a sea of tents


Matthew Herbert and his amazing big band playing to about 27 people...