Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist, short-story writer and freelance critic living and working in London.Variously an antique dealer and a small holder she has written about the visual arts for twenty years for such publications as Time Out, The Independent on Sunday, The Independent and The New Statesman. She has published two collections of poetry, Everything Begins with the Skin (Enitharmon) and Ghost Station (Salt) and appeared in the Oxford Poets series (Carcarnet). She was the Poetry Society's first ever Public Art Poet, responsible for London's largest public art poem at Waterloo station, and has published a novel, Depth of Field (Dewi Lewis) and a collection of short stories Rothko's Red (Salt). Her selected art writing is to be published next year by Damien Hirst's Other Criteria.Website: http://www.suehubbard.com Email: [email protected]
by Sue Hubbard A response to the BBC’s Panorama programme and the Labour party crisis I am Jew –ish. The ish is important. For although I had four Jewish grandparents and Hitler would certainly have turned me into toast if I’d been born a few years earlier over the wrong side of the Channel, my…
by Sue Hubbard Okay. I’m done. I’m through. I’m hanging up my ruby red slippers, my fuck-me shoes. I’m not going down that yellow brick road no more, no more. I’m giving up internet dating. I may have run a successful antique business in Portobello Road for many years which kept my three children in…
…in this post-truth world that there can be no coherent story.
“What do you paint?” Einstein asked. To which the painter of masks replied “Nothing”
The subtly of Alice Maher’s work lies not only in its flawless execution but in her ability to weave narratives of personal trauma with references from fairy tale, psychoanalysis, anthropological myth and the history of botanical illustration.
by Sue Hubbard I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. Whatever I see I swallow immediately Mirror —Sylvia Plath Like many good ideas it is deceptively simple. The artist Mark Wallinger has installed a large mirror across the ceiling of Sigmund Freud's iconic study in Maresfield Gardens. The effect is dramatic. Immediately the…
…it might be suggested, in Freudian terms, that her work was produced as a result of sexual repression or hysteria, not dissimilar to the ‘organismic’ ecstatic visions experienced female Catholic saints.
by Sue Hubbard It seems a long time ago since the Tate Summer party to celebrate the opening of the new Switch House adjoining the original Bankside Power Station. It was a different world then. On the 16th June, the date of the party, we were still in Europe. The architects Herzog & de Meuron,…
It is a truth pretty much universally acknowledged that the past is another country. But that this country, this green and pleasant land should be seen as ‘other’, experienced through ‘foreign’ eyes, provides an interesting perspective on our identity.
by Sue Hubbard It is said that the camera never lies – but that was before things went digital. At the Victoria Miro Gallery, Stan Douglas has created a number of disturbingly hyperreal images with the use of digital technology that give the illusion of documentary accuracy. These theatrical black and white mise en scènes…
It’s those who are not entirely comfortable within the all-encompassing duvet of family life that prove to be interesting. Their quirks and idiosyncrasies lead them to become artists and writersor simply that awkward, interesting child who doesn’t want to join in but rather watch clouds, read a book, draw or make up stories.
Her work requires patience, like the reading of a complex modernist poem. It unfolds slowly, so there is not an obvious sense of a coherent whole but rather images that fit together to create associations and metaphors.
All his subjects are simply a jumping off points, the start of a process, of a series of propositions, an existential argument about existence conducted through the language of paint.
by Sue Hubbard Four a.m. on an October Sunday morning. It's dark and there's a chill in the air as we head towards Dover. I am joining an artist friend to visit refugees in the Calais Jungle. She is a Catholic, so we are going with a west London Catholic mission. In the back of…
…this is politics as art, rather than art as politics
In that sense his walks are pilgrimages for a secular age, when in all the rush and razzmatazz there is simply the movement of the walking body, the breath, the landscape, the ‘now’.
It too easy to dismiss Hepworth’s work as dated, the sort of sculpture with its holes and strings that was satirised in Punch magazine in the 50s and 60s as ‘modern art’.
To sit among Martin’s white paintings, The Islands I-XII, 1979, is akin to being alone with Rothko’s Seagram paintings
You really do wonder, sometimes, just how long some women artists have to be around before anyone takes notice.
by Sue Hubbard It was an early spring morning. The sky deep blue and the wind cruel as journalists and international camera crews gathered for the unveiling of the tenth sculpture commissioned for Trafalgar Square's empty fourth plinth. A stylish coffee vendor on a vintage bicycle, peddling for all he was worth to provide the…