Becoming Human in Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s Paintings
It was New Year’s Day, 1569, and the Imperial Court of the Holy Roman Empire was alive with festive splendour: populated by an eclectic coterie of entertainers, furnished with exotic menageries, and known for its elaborate five-course banquets, it would have been an absolute feast for the senses o
Wisteria
Love never came and raved but bent low and whispered: spring wisteria that once dipped its neck to press its pretty face to yours. You bent too, to listen, and every building stooped to see your sunlit form find silence in the street. ∎ Words by James Turner. Art by Betsy McGrath.
Love Et Cetera
There is nothing sexy about tardiness, I remind my date as she rocks up outside the cinema a full ten minutes after our scheduled meeting time. And yet there is something about her arrival that immediately injects our first encounter with an air of the erotic. Perhaps it is the effusive hug with whi
Ugandan-Asian Food and Identity 50 Years On
“To remember a recipe and to produce in one’s kitchen the dish to which it refers – indeed to recall in a new time or place a taste one once savoured in another time and place – is to demonstrate a cultural memory and to ‘write’ oneself into history” (Dan Ojwang in ‘‘Eat pi
Tea-time: in conversation with Jen Monroe
Jen Monroe is a chef and artist whose project, Bad Taste, is committed to exploring new ways of thinking about food and consumption, approaching food as fantasy and as a transportive medium. Past work has included a dinner about the honey bee health crisis, a 100–square–foot edible map o
Bosch: Hypnotic Degeneration
I have always called myself an atheist, but this spring I found myself on a pilgrimage. Desperate for cultural enrichment on my short holiday in Madrid, I stood in front of the neat white steps of the Prado. My friends and I, vaguely hungover, flinched at the packs of European schoolchildren queuing
Getting creative: the feminine twist in a masculinist movement
Many thanks to Monika Kozub for providing the images to illustrate this article. It means so much to be supported by a creative I admire and whose work has inspired me in many ways. Please check out her PERIOD series, which is part of a campaign to tackle period poverty! On a red-velvet chair, I [&h
Seeing Double
Squirrelled away in Room 65 of the Ashmolean Museum are two remarkable landscapes. The paintings hang side by side in the Pissarro Gallery, surrounded by a collection of nineteenth-century pictures, and have done so for over a decade. They are, to wit, Camille Pissarro’s View from my Window and Vi
LOOKING BEYOND BORDERS WITH ARMS OUTSTRETCHED
By virtue of its own hybridity as a manifesto, invitation, and poem, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera reimagines political borders; it observes their artificiality and porousness. Written in Spanish and English, Borderlands is perceptive and analytical; deconstructive and didactic. Anzal