Shortlisted for the Independent Podcast Awards 2023. Subscribe to receive exclusive weekly content at www.thegallerycompanion.com

In this week’s episode I am talking about lines -- the ones that you can see and the invisible ones that you can only feel. It’s a subject that the geographer Maxim Samson discusses in his recently published book, Invisible Lines, which is an exploration of the hidden geographies that affect the way we exist in and move through our physical environments. These are lines that we experience and sense, consciously and subconsciously acting on them.

I talk about these ideas in relation to the work of the New York-based artist Mika Rottenberg, whose film Cosmic Generator (2017) explores ideas about the movement and restriction of goods and people, and the visible and invisible divisions that are constructed to separate us.

And I discuss the charcoal portraits of the British artist Frank Auerbach, whose practice of drawing the faces of his sitters and rubbing them out repeatedly in his quest to represent the truth suggests to me another kind of invisible boundary in space — that separation between two people that we can feel and sense but we can’t see.

If you’d like to access the full podcast you can subscribe to it on my Substack publication at thegallerycompanion.com. A subscription gets you a podcast and email from me every Sunday and access to a lovely community of artists and art lovers from around the world.

The Gallery Companion is hosted by writer and historian Dr Victoria Powell. It's a thought-provoking dive into the interesting questions and messy stuff about our lives that art explores and represents.

Shortlisted for the Independent Podcast Awards 2023. Subscribe to receive exclusive weekly content at www.thegallerycompanion.com

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about the practice of looking closely at things. It started when one of my readers sent me some wonderful writing and drawings that her boys had done in response to an exhibition in London that I reviewed a few weeks ago.

With a brief to write what they thought about the artworks, my young friends spent over an hour deeply engrossed in looking closely at them. The critical thinking and stretching of imagination evident in both boys’ observations made me think once again about how valuable art is for children’s learning. The benefits spill over in every direction, not only in the process of making art but also in thinking about it. Kids learn to identify patterns and structures, think about scale and perspective, describe and question, imagine and analyse. Then there’s the social and emotional learning that goes on.

The practice of looking closely, of slow contemplation, is the opposite of what is going on for the majority of children nowadays, according to the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whose new book The Anxious Generation explores what he calls the ‘Great Re-Wiring of Childhood’. One of the compelling arguments he makes is about how current levels of smartphone usage are likely to have a detrimental impact on the development of young brains.

In this week’s episode I talk about all of this, and I discuss the work of two British artists, Tiffany Arntson and Rackstraw Downes, whose practice is all about looking closely.

If you’d like to access the full podcast you can subscribe to it on my Substack publication at thegallerycompanion.com. A subscription gets you a podcast and email from me every Sunday and access to a lovely community of artists and art lovers from around the world.

The Gallery Companion is hosted by writer and historian Dr Victoria Powell. It's a thought-provoking dive into the interesting questions and messy stuff about our lives that art explores and represents.

Shortlisted for the Independent Podcast Awards 2023. Subscribe to receive exclusive weekly content at www.thegallerycompanion.com

I’ve often heard artists talk about how making art for them is not optional, it’s essential. Life-saving, even. In this week's episode I discuss the meaning of the phrase ‘art is life’ by thinking about the work of one of Britain’s leading conceptual artists, Martin Creed.

He has said that for him there is no separating line between what he creates and anything else he does in his day. Other people might call what he does ‘art’ but he’s not sure what ‘art’ actually is. He does what he does to try and grasp on to something solid to help him get through life. Art is something you can rely on, he says. It’s a relief. I know what he means, and it has given me another perspective on his work.

If you’d like to access the full podcast you can subscribe to it on my Substack publication at thegallerycompanion.com. A subscription gets you a podcast and email from me every Sunday and access to a lovely community of artists and art lovers from around the world.

The Gallery Companion is hosted by writer and historian Dr Victoria Powell. It's a thought-provoking dive into the interesting questions and messy stuff about our lives that art explores and represents.