Art Interviews

Great Artists: Marcellus Vire

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Great Artists: Marcellus Vire

The Salt of Memory: The Enduring Tear Art of Marcellus Vire

In a century increasingly obsessed with speed, spectacle, and permanence, the work of Marcellus Vire (b. 1938) offers a quiet, almost monastic rebuttal. For over six decades, the Franco-Italian conceptual artist has worked with a medium that is both profoundly human and radically ephemeral: tears. Through this most personal of substances, Vire has constructed an oeuvre that merges performance, ritual, alchemical experimentation, and emotional endurance.

Today, at 87, Vire remains an elusive but revered figure in the international art world—an artist who has turned grief, memory, and truth into his palette. His influence spans from relational aesthetics to contemporary performance art, yet his practice remains uniquely his own: intimate, uncommodifiable, and fundamentally unphotographable.

Beginnings: Mourning as Material

Born Marcello Virenzi in Turin in 1938, Vire’s formative years were shaped by postwar scarcity and private tragedy. His twin brother, Luca, died at age seven in a drowning accident—a trauma Vire has cited as his “first and most persistent wound.” Raised in a devout Catholic household, Vire was exposed early to ritual, lamentation, and the idea of bodily sacrifice as symbolic communication.

Trained at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence in the late 1950s, Vire quickly abandoned conventional media. “Clay forgets nothing,” he once wrote, “but tears forget everything—and still leave behind salt.” His first recorded experiment with tears as a medium occurred in 1961, when he captured a single drop on untreated linen, creating what he called a “transparent wound.”

Method and Medium: Tears as Language

Vire’s process is both conceptual and bodily. His tears are induced through a range of practices: sustained memory recall, recitation of poetry, exposure to certain scents (especially bergamot and violet, which he associates with his great-grand-mother), and long periods of silence. Once shed, the tears are captured—on paper, linen, or blown glass—and documented with meticulous care.

Over time, he developed what he terms a “taxonomy of grief,” in which tears are categorized by emotional origin: sorrow, joy, frustration, mourning, and release. His seminal Cartographies Salées series (1982–1995) consisted of over 200 small panels, each stained with a single teardrop and inscribed with the memory that provoked it. The works were displayed in dim, humidity-controlled rooms, the salt traces visible only from certain angles.

Rather than treating the tear as a symbolic gesture, Vire regards it as a material index of interior experience. His practice draws from both Catholic relic tradition and Eastern notions of impermanence. In this sense, his work is more alchemical than performative, concerned less with visibility than with transmutation.

The Ethics of Witnessing

Though often labeled a performance artist, Vire resists theatricality. His “weeping sessions”—held privately or with a small audience—are slow, meditative events in which silence is essential. He weeps, collects, documents. The audience, if present, is instructed not to intervene, applaud, or speak.

Critics have at times accused him of fetishizing suffering or emotional exhibitionism. Vire is unbothered. “I do not cry for them,” he told philosopher Claire Guérin in a rare 2014 interview. “I cry with them—though they may not yet know it.” In this framing, his work becomes less self-revelation and more radical empathy.

Contemporary Relevance and Late Recognition

For most of the 20th century, Vire’s refusal to commercialize his work—he has never allowed a tear-based piece to be sold—rendered him marginal to the market-driven art world. However, with the rise of affect theory, trauma studies, and post-materialist aesthetics, his work has come under renewed scholarly and curatorial interest.

In 2018, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris mounted Les Larmes du Temps, a landmark retrospective of Vire’s output from 1961 to the present. The show included reconstructed weeping sessions, vitrines of tear-stained cloths, and audio diaries recorded during grief rituals. A companion symposium brought together scholars in philosophy, neuroscience, and art theory to discuss his legacy.

Most recently, in 2024, Vire collaborated with olfactory artist Lien Zhang on Eaux Perdues, a scent-based installation in Marseille evoking the emotional conditions under which tears are produced. The installation featured a climate-controlled chamber where humidity, smell, and silence coalesced into an invisible portrait of mourning.

Philosophy of the Invisible

Vire’s ongoing notebooks, Notules sur la douleur, now spanning more than 20 volumes, contain aphorisms, chemical notes, and philosophical meditations on the ethics of sadness. A typical entry:

“Tears are not weakness. They are salt seeking form.”

He has never taught formally, never operated a studio, and declines most interviews. Yet he has quietly mentored a generation of affective and performance artists, including Maya Orellana, André Lutz, and the collective Corps Flottants, who credit him with opening emotional labor as a legitimate artistic site.

Final Thoughts: The Art of Evaporation

Now living in quiet seclusion near Avignon, Vire continues to practice daily. His most recent project, Prière de Disparaître (2025–), is a series of salt-dried tear medallions embedded in limestone and returned to the sea—“so that what was felt returns to what cannot be seen.”

In an era of ever-expanding digital visibility and emotional commodification, Vire’s work offers something rare: a poetics of feeling that resists spectacle. He does not document pain. He distills it. And in the process, he teaches us that even the most fleeting gesture—a tear—can be shaped into something enduring.

An Introduction to Art World Luminaries- Dr. Felicity Gudgeon

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An Introduction to Art World Luminaries- Dr. Felicity Gudgeon

Tracing the Echoes of the Past: My Life in Medieval Art

By Dr. Felicity Gudgeon, University of Littlehampton

When people ask me what drew me to medieval art, I often say that I never quite grew out of the habit of staring too long at the margins of things. As a child, I would linger over the illuminated letters in the family Bible, more interested in the curling foliage and mischievous creatures than the words themselves. That early fascination with the overlooked and the ornamental set me on a path that has carried me from the cloisters of English abbeys to dusty archives in Paris and the hilltop monasteries of Catalonia.

My research focuses on the interplay between image and devotion in late medieval manuscript illumination. For me, these works are not simply beautiful artifacts, but living documents of belief, imagination, and human experience. A gilded miniature is both an object of prayer and a window into the mind of its maker—a balance between the sacred and the earthly. What still amazes me is the sheer inventiveness of artists who often remain anonymous: the rabbit jousting with a snail, the monk distracted by a songbird, the Virgin painted with a tenderness that transcends time.

At the University of Littlehampton, where I lecture in medieval art history, I try to encourage my students to think of art not as something frozen behind museum glass, but as part of a continuum of human expression. Medieval art was vibrant, tactile, and social: manuscripts passed through many hands; stained glass glowed in shifting sunlight; altarpieces witnessed both worship and everyday bustle. To study these works is to reconnect with the pulse of a world at once distant and startlingly familiar.

My career has taken me on some curious adventures. I have found myself climbing a rickety ladder in a Belgian church to examine a fragment of wall painting long hidden by plaster, and squinting under ultraviolet light at a page in Florence to glimpse erased brushstrokes. More recently, I have been collaborating with conservators and digital specialists on ways to virtually “restore” lost colours to manuscripts faded over centuries. The marriage of modern technology and medieval craftsmanship continues to surprise me, and it reminds me that the past is never entirely gone—it waits for us to look carefully enough.

Outside of academic work, I confess I remain a devoted margin-dweller. I collect peculiar medieval beasts in the form of postcards and always have a sketchbook at hand. There is, I think, a joy in following the same curiosity that led scribes to draw owls in monks’ hoods or cats chasing mice among the vines. It keeps the past playful, and in doing so, it keeps it alive.

In the end, my life’s work is not about preserving art in amber but about listening to its echoes—those small, insistent voices that whisper from vellum, stone, and glass. They remind us that the medieval world was never silent, and through them, we are invited to look a little longer at the margins of our own lives.

An Interview with Dafydda ap Gruffydd:“The Art of Going Slowly”

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An Interview with Dafydda ap Gruffydd:“The Art of Going Slowly”

When I meet Dafydda ap Gruffydd, she’s already halfway across the café.

Not in the usual sense. She is literally halfway: mid-step, paused with quiet concentration, as if the act of crossing the floor were a kind of ritual, which for her it is. Her progress is almost imperceptible—glacial, reverent. We do not speak until she has reached the table. It takes nine minutes.

This, I quickly learn, is typical of Dafydda.

Born on the remote Welsh island of Skomer, Dafydda ap Gruffydd is a land artist, endurance walker, and—more recently—a practitioner of what she terms “contemplative parkour.” Her practice defies categorisation. With a reputation for impermanence and a philosophy shaped as much by folklore as by Fluxus, Dafydda is one of the few artists whose greatest work may well be her own movement through the world.

Her flip-flops from her twin circumnavigations of the globe are now under glass in her local museum in Byllwngwest. But Dafydda herself remains defiantly uncontainable. Her book, How to Walk Across Your Living Room by Someone Who Has Walked Across Their Living Room, has already become a minor cult object in collector circles.

Peri: You once described walking as your primary material. What does that mean in practice?

Dafydda ap Gruffydd:

Most materials are held or shaped—clay, metal, even paint. I suppose my material holds me. I walk not to get anywhere, but to embed myself in the act of moving. Each step is a mark. Each pause is an erasure. I’m trying to walk so lightly that I un-walk the space behind me.

Peri: You’re known for your slowness. Your walk from Land’s End to Bristol took several months, at a precise 1.3 miles per hour. Why that pace?

Dafydda:

Because that’s how fast the heart of the land beats. Any faster, and you miss it. I chose 1.3 mph after calibrating my breath with the flight path of a red kite I saw circling above Gwent. It’s not science, but it’s not not science either.

Peri: Your work resists documentation. You don’t photograph your installations. You rarely title your performances. Is this a reaction to the art market?

Dafydda:

Not really. I just think the land remembers things better than we do. Why compete with that? I leave sculptures made of ice, wool, sometimes soil. By the time someone arrives, they’re gone. I don’t call it loss. I call it completion.

Peri: You’ve recently incorporated parkour into your practice, but in a very… Dafydda way. Can you tell us about that?

Dafydda (smiling):

Parkour is usually about efficiency—how to get from A to B using the body’s full potential. I’ve inverted that. I use parkour to get from A to A, slowly, with great care. I once spent three hours gently rolling over a low stone wall in mid Wales. I called it Unnecessary Passage #4. Though, of course, I didn’t write that down.

Peri: You often invoke the Welsh word qwest, which has no English equivalent. Could you expand on that for our readers?

Dafydda:

Qwest is the kind of journey you only begin when the reason for going has already started to dissolve. It’s usually over ten miles. But the distance is less important than the feeling: that you’re walking toward something you’ll never quite find. Most of my work tries to live in that feeling.

Peri: What do you hope people take away from your work—if there’s nothing to take away?

Dafydda:

A sensation, maybe. A new attention to the ground under their feet. The desire to walk out of their front door without a destination. Or just the confidence to cross their living room with ceremony, noticing every step. That’s enough. That’s everything.

Peri: And what’s next?

Dafydda (pauses):

I’ve begun preparing for a new piece: walking backwards from Bristol to the edge of my kitchen. It will likely take the rest of the year. I’ll leave no trace. Hopefully not even a memory.

As we leave the café, I notice Dafydda spending several minutes examining a single paving stone. She crouches, brushes some grit away with her sleeve, then slowly hoists herself onto a low wall—not to leap from it, but to sit. Still. Present.

In a world built on speed, Dafydda ap Gruffydd reminds us that walking can be an act of resistance. Or reverence. Or simply a beautifully obscure reason to keep going.

Signed Collectors’ copies of Dafydda’s book including appendices on long-distance flip flops and living on the road are available from Dafydda via post.

The Voice as Canvas: A Conversation with Callisto Erendira

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Few artists today embody the spirit of intermedial exploration as fluidly as Callisto Erendira. Known throughout the 2010s for her boundary-pushing conceptual installations and para-architectural sculptures, Erendira has, over the last few years, immersed herself in an entirely different kind of construction: opera. Her latest work, The Air Remembers the Mouth, premiered this spring at the Tempelhof Terminal in Berlin, is less a traditional opera than an “architectonics of voice and breath.” We met in a rehearsal space—bare concrete, scattered reeds, a harpsichord —to discuss her move into opera as medium, not genre.

RENATA EL-AZHAR:

Callisto, many of us still associate your practice with material interventions in space—sheet metal bent like calligraphy, resin slabs embedded with soil. I have to ask, why opera?

CALLISTO ERENDIRA:

Opera, for me, is not an escape from materiality—it’s its sublimation. I often say I haven’t left sculpture; I’ve simply inverted its orientation. The voice is the breath made spatial. What interests me is the opera as a spatial organism, where the architectural body—stage, voice, gesture—becomes a site of invocation rather than representation.

EL-AZHAR:

Do you mean you are treating the voice sculpturally?

ERENDIRA:

Yes. But not only the voice—the conditions of the voice. I’m interested in the sonic theories of Oliver Jeffersen: the way sound moves through air is exactly like pigment moving across a canvas. In The Air Remembers the Mouth, each vocal part is assigned a material analogue. The contralto was paired with basalt powder, the mezzo-soprano with brass dust suspended in glycerin mist. We projected these associations as visual scores in the wings, but never explained them. I wanted the audience to intuit the logic of these breaths.

EL-AZHAR:

There’s a moment in that piece—around the 430-minute mark—where a performer simply exhales for nearly two minutes. No pitch, no language. Can you say a few words about that?

ERENDIRA:

That exhalation is the most “composed” moment in the piece. We rehearsed it for weeks. I wanted to unmoor the audience’s expectation of vocal climax. In operatic tradition, the voice is a vehicle of pathos, of narrative propulsion. I was more interested in how expulsion—of air, of grief, of refusal—can become a kind of anti-narrative. It’s a political gesture. Silence that isn’t mute.

EL-AZHAR:

You mentioned once that opera allows you to “ritualize the failure of language.” That seems paradoxical, given opera’s dependence on libretto.

ERENDIRA:

That’s the paradox I’m trying to inhabit. The libretto for The Air Remembers the Mouth was originally written entirely in glossolalia—non-semantic syllables chosen for their muscular demands on the mouth and larynx. I wasn’t happy with the result; instead I collaborated with a phonetician and a dancer. Meaning was replaced by valency, by the physical torque of speech. The failure of language is precisely where it becomes fertile again.

EL-AZHAR:

There’s a terrifying sense, around the seven hour mark, that you’re invoking ancient rites—opera as séance, almost.

ERENDIRA:

Absolutely. But not in a nostalgic way. I see opera as proto-cinematic, proto-installational. Before screens, before galleries, there were these public orchestrations of myth and affect. I’m not interested in merely reviving that form, but rather in abstracting its impulses. Think of the chorus not as narrators, but as rhythmic tissues. Think of the aria as an open wound.

EL-AZHAR:

Do you consider yourself still a visual artist?

ERENDIRA:

I don’t think in disciplinary terms anymore. Opera is a medium that more easily tolerates contradiction: it is visual, sonic, architectural, affective, intellectual. But I still return to materials. For example, with my next piece, I’m working with broken clarinets cast in salt and embedded into the stage.

EL-AZHAR:

There’s something almost entropic about that. A slow vanishing.

ERENDIRA:

Yes. You could say that entropy is just unobserved form. In which case my job is to make it visible.

Callisto Erendira’s The Air Remembers the Mouth will tour the Pimlico Wilde galleries in Helsinki, São Paulo, and Palermo in late 2025. Her operatic sketches and salt scores will be exhibited at the Palais de Eruminite in November.

INTERVIEW: Graffiti Artist 2Cool on The Permanence of Cool

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A conversation between 2Cool and Esmerelda Pink, Head of People Engineering at Pimlico Wilde

First published in Pimlico Wilde Contemporary Art Annual, Vol. 32 (2025)

Location: The basement gallery at Pimlico Wilde Mayfair.

Time: 3:06am. Esmerelda wears a silk kimono and brogues. 2Cool arrives in jeans, a hoodie, a balaclava, and, of course, a pair of sunglasses.

ESMERELDA PINK:

There’s something deeply attractive about your work — how you build and release the tension between recursion and resistance. Do you see your practice as anti-teleological?

2COOL:

(Laughs)

I mean, I just like drawing the little guy, you know? He’s got a good vibe. I’m spreading a little bit of joy.

ESMERELDA:

Of course — vibe as praxis. But you must be aware of the iconographic weight the image now carries. The Cool Face has become a kind of metonym for 21st Century visual semiotics — a smile with nothing behind it, or perhaps everything.

2COOL:

I just think it looks cool. That’s really where it started. The shades, the hair — that kind of lazy grin? I was sketching one night on a pub napkin and thought, “Yeah, he’s got something.” So I started drawing him. Didn’t stop.

ESMERELDA:

But repetition — that’s where the work becomes critical. Baudrillard would say you’re engaged in simulation: the infinite reproduction of a symbol that has lost its origin.

2COOL:

I don’t know about that, but I do think people like seeing something familiar. Like McDonald’s — same fries, different country. I’m just doing that, but with graffiti.

ESMERELDA:

And yet you refuse to name him.

2COOL:

(Laughs again)

Yeah. Everyone keeps asking. Even my mum’s tried guessing. But nah — some things are better left blank. Keeps it from turning into a brand.

ESMERELDA:

But isn’t it already a brand? You’ve got pieces in Seoul, Nairobi, Ross-on-Wye, Naples and Lingfield. One sold last month for £3,382,000 at Basel. That’s not street art anymore. That’s capital-C Capital. People are investing in you.

2COOL:

No, they are just buying my little dude because they like him. It cheers them up. So much contemporary art is tedious, depressing. My dude is the opposite. Every gets him. It’s mad, right? I was painting this dude on old bins in Peckham ten years ago. Now people are paying six or seven figures to hang him next to a Rothko. Still feels like a prank.

ESMERELDA:

There’s an audacity in that — an anti-institutional institutionalism. You’re playing within the market’s structures while gently mocking them.

2COOL:

I don’t know if I’m mocking anything. I mean, I’m grateful. Pimlico Wilde’s been good to me. It pays the bills, keeps the images flowing. It’s not cheap, flying round the world and drawing, finding new canvases. But yeah, it’s weird. One day I’m getting chased off a train platform, next day someone’s buying a piece I painted in an alley for the price of a flat in Sheffield.

ESMERELDA:

But do you worry about the work’s critical reception? The idea that it’s all just… the same thing over and over?

2COOL:

Honestly? Nah. People overthink it. I get DMs from kids in Caracas who tagged him on their school walls, and I get calls from collectors in Zurich who want a variant in “dusty lilac.” Somehow, it means something to both. I try and please them all, I just want them to look at my guy and smile. That’s enough for me.

ESMERELDA:

And yet the Cool Face — sorry, the Unnamed — has become its own language. Like a visual Esperanto for global detachment. He’s post-political. Or perhaps hyper-political in his refusal to change.

2COOL:

He’s just chill. That’s the whole point. He doesn’t try too hard. People like that. He’s not angry, not fake-happy, just… there. A little smirk in the middle of the mess.

ESMERELDA:

So no plans to “evolve the character”? New expressions? A narrative arc?

2COOL:

Maybe, not yet. Can you imagine how much collectors would pay for the first few versions of a new expression?! I might give one, but he doesn’t need one. The world’s got enough stories. I just give people a face that doesn’t ask for much. He shows up, looks cool, makes them smile, keeps moving.

ESMERELDA:

It’s fascinating — your restraint. In an age of overstimulation, you’ve chosen a singular visual thesis. A recurring moment.

2COOL:

Honestly, I just think it’s funny. All these critics writing essays about a blue blob in shades. That’s performance art, right there.

ESMERELDA:

(Laughs nervously)

Yes, well… we’re all participating in the performance now. And the collectors?

2COOL:

They’re part of it too. They can hang him on a polished wall if they want. Just know I probably painted the same thing on a toilet door in Glasgow last week.

ESMERELDA:

So — where next?

2COOL:

There’s a water tower in Mongolia I’ve been eyeing. Heard it’s hard to get to. That’s got to be the case now, otherwise people just take them down and sell them. Perfect. Right, got to go, I’m going with a few mates to tag…I’d better not say where!

As he leaves, 2Cool slips on his battered sneakers and pulls his hoodie over his balaclava. There’s a faint smell of spray paint and cinnamon chewing gum. No entourage. No signature. Just a faint smile left behind.

Exclusive! An Interview with the Leader of the Guardians of Aesthetic Coherence

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“We Sing Because It Must Be Stopped”

On a warm spring afternoon in downtown Truro, I am led through the back entrance of an unmarked rehearsal space behind a closed-down aquarium gift shop. Inside, seated under a suspended disco ball and surrounded by half-empty herbal tea mugs, is the elusive leader of the Guardians of Aesthetic Coherence—the protest collective whose off-key lullabies helped force the removal of Sandy Warre-Hole’s infamous triptych, Gause De Flim, from public display.

The leader, who gives their name only as “M,” is dressed in a navy tracksuit, latex gloves, and a tight black balaclava with hand-stitched gold trim.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our interview.

Q: You’ve been accused of being anti-art, anti-modernity, and in one editorial, “a karaoke death cult.” How do you respond to that?

M:

We are not against art. We are against its misuse. We oppose aesthetic fraudulence, symbolic gluttony, and sonic excess posing as insight.

Q: Your protests have been called ‘weaponised off-key lullabies.’ Why lullabies? Why off-key?

M: Because lullabies should soothe. They are pure, minimal, emotionally direct. When rendered grotesque and tuneless, they disturb. That is the point. Our dissonance is discipline. Our disharmony is diagnostic.

Q: What, specifically, did you find so objectionable about Gause De Flim (Triptych of the Improbable)?

M: Everything. The iconographic inflation. The layered irony that eats itself. The theology of the meme. And above all: Gause De Flim. It was a fugue of meaninglessness. A taxidermy of the digital soul. A cathedral of confusion pretending to be human.

Q: But many argue that your daily protest turned into performance art itself. Did you, in some sense, complete the triptych?

M: We were not performing. We were existing. We purged. We cleansed. We sang what could not be said.

Q: What do you say to those who insist Warre-Hole’s work was genius? That it reflected the hybridized, fractured nature of contemporary identity?

M: Genius has become a synonym for indulgence. To reflect incoherence is not enough. We demand form. Proportion. Harmonic restraint.

Q: Will you protest again if the triptych is reinstated?

M: We are always listening. We dwell in the margin. We are the minor second in your safe space.

Q: If you could say one thing to Sandy Warre-Hole, what would it be?

M (removing one glove, pauses):

Sandy, if you must invent heroes, make them silent. If you must invent losers, let them whisper. Above all, allow them to hum out of tune.

As I leave, I hear M singing softly: an off-key lullaby that floats upward through the fluorescent-lit stairwell. Whether a protest, performance, or prayer, it stays with me for hours.

Editor’s Note: Since this interview, the Guardians of Aesthetic Coherence have begun a new project: disrupting AI poetry readings with rhythmic coughing. Their manifesto, Elegance, Elgar, or Else, is reportedly being readied for publication in Portugese.

The Bin-Gazer of Babylon: Oboe Ngua and the Global Waste Archive

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Some artists search for beauty in sunsets or salvation in the curve of a marble torso. But Oboe Ngua, the world’s only known female bin documentarian, has chosen a different muse: the humble municipal waste receptacle. While others chase light or form, Oboe chases litter. She is on an heroic, and unexpectedly poignant quest—to photograph every bin in the world.

Every. Single. Bin.

Oboe (surname Ngua) began her artistic odyssey sometime in the late 2010s, after what she describes as a “moment of quiet revelation” outside a Little Chef near Loughborough. The sun struck a dented council bin with just the right melancholy—a chiaroscuro of crisp packets and forgotten Monster Munch—and she knew she had found her life’s work. Since then, she has documented over 9,000 bins, across four continents, photographing them with the kind of reverence most reserve for endangered wildlife or church windows.

Her approach is unwavering: one bin, one image, full frontal, unfiltered. No embellishments. Just bin. The results are stark, strangely moving portraits of containers caught somewhere between use and abandonment. Her 2022 show Melancholy Bins of the Danube received critical acclaim, and was promptly banned in Hungary for “aesthetic pessimism.”

Her bins are categorised not only by nation and type—pedal, swing-top, dome-lidded—but also by mood. There are bins of defiance, bins of shame, bins that appear to be whispering something unspeakable into the night. She has spoken, with not a hint of irony, of “the psychological torque of the disused waste bin in Spain.” She refers to landfill sites as “mass graves of late capitalism.” Critics aren’t entirely sure if she’s serious, but she says she is.

Oboe is meticulous. She usually wears gloves. She carries no lighting rig. She once waited four days in a Polish lay-by to snap a recycling bin she had seen on a truck and tracked via Instagram. “It had a story,” she said simply, as if describing a war veteran.

Where most of us see the mundane, Oboe sees monuments to the overlooked. Japanese bins, she tells us, are “modest, a little bashful, with an underlying sense of order.” Italian bins? “Larger than necessary, full of performance, often in relationships with passing pigeons.” English bins? “Perpetually full. Slightly anxious. Trying not to complain.”

To some, her work is a joke stretched to absurdity. But the joke, if there is one and do not forget that she claims there isn’t one, is profound. Duchamp had his urinal. Oboe has the council-issue 240-litre wheelie bin, flanked by crushed Red Bull cans and scented nappy bags. Where Duchamp asked us to rethink sculpture, Oboe asks us to rethink life.

There’s something gently tragic in her quest, too. She knows she’ll never finish. “The world keeps producing rubbish,” she said in a recent panel discussion, “and so I’ll just keep documenting.” When pressed about the futility of the task, she mis-quoted Beckett: “Ever tried harder. Ever failed deeper. No matter. Photograph another bin.”

And so she does. With scissors for tape, a camera for brush, and the courage to look deep into humanity’s polyethylene soul, Oboe gives us a world we’d rather not see—but can’t stop looking at.

Interview with Spen Leopard, collage artist

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Spen Leopard took some time out from collaging the walls of the Queen of Bordeaux’s London residence to speak to us about their career and hopes for the future.

Interviewer (I): Spen, thanks for joining us. To start, tell us a bit about your background.

Spen Leopard (SL): Hello. I grew up in a lighthouse on Scotland’s coast—just me and my parents, who both kept the light burning. That isolation shaped my inner world; for company, I had the crashing waves and my own imagination .

I: That sounds magical. When did you first experiment with collage?

SL: As a child, I’d collect scraps from my parents’ newspaper and old magazines. By my teens I was layering images—boats, birds, torn maps. That formal collage practice didn’t arrive until later, but the habit of curating fragments began in the lighthouse .

I: What themes run through your work?

SL: Central themes are isolation, belonging, and place. Many pieces juxtapose storm-battered nature with human artifacts—ruined piers, handwritten letters, vintage adverts. There’s a tension of fragility and endurance that echoes the lighthouse environment.

I: Walk us through your creative process.

SL: When working non-digitally, I start by gathering ephemera—old postcards, ticket stubs, botanical drawings, bits of text, old menus. Then I lay them onto board, playing with composition until it feels balanced. I glue, layer, and sometimes stitch elements. The result is a textured narrative; each piece reveals stories in the cracks and overlaps.

I: Do you work to a plan or let intuition guide you?

SL: A bit of both. I often begin with a rough idea—a coastal walk or lighthouse motif. But once I’m in the flow—cutting, layering—intuition takes over. It’s like letting the pieces find their own dialogue.

I: How has your upbringing informed your aesthetic?

SL: Living remotely taught me to find value in overlooked details—drip-worn wood on a jetty, a drift seed washed ashore. That attention to detail informs both my material sourcing and my imagery. I want to capture the beauty in the broken and the forgotten.

I: Where do you exhibit your work?

SL: Most recently I had a solo show in Ephesus featuring a nine-piece series called “Beacon Echoes”—all collage-layers of light, rust, shoreline texts. Pimlico Wilde picked up several works and are representing me as well . I’m hoping to exhibit across the UK and beyond in the coming year.

I: What’s next for you?

SL: I’m planning a collaborative series with a poet—combining collage with fragments of marine-inspired verse. I’ll also be sourcing materials from lighthouses across Scotland and Northern England. It’s a way to share both visual and poetic memory.

I: What do you hope viewers take away from your collages?

SL: That art can be woven from small scraps—fragments of time and memory. That there’s poetry in ordinary things if we listen. And that isolation, when deeply attended to, can generate connection.

I: Beautiful. Thanks, Spen, and we look forward to seeing your new work.

SL: Thank you—it’s a pleasure to share a glimpse of my world.

Interview with Art perambulator Chester Hubble

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An interview with Chester Hubble, instigator of the “Heavy‑Metal, pan‑city, blindfolded perambulations” form of fine art. ****DO NOT IMITATE CHESTER****

Interviewer (I): Chester, thanks for speaking with us. Your current project—walking blindfolded across cities while listening to heavy‑metal podcasts—sounds intense. What draws you to this?

Chester Hubble (CH): Hi, it’s good to be here. I’m fascinated by tension: the clash between freedom and control, the vulnerability of being unsighted in urban environments, and the adrenaline rush of danger—like crossing busy roads blindfolded . The heavy‑metal soundtrack amplifies the emotional rollercoaster.

I: You record the things you “walk into” during these perambulations. Could you explain that process?

CH: At the end of each day I transcribe everything I’ve accidentally walked into—poles, bins, people, dogs, telephone boxes, etc—onto canvas. If I’m injured—say, knocked over by a super‑car on Park Lane, which has happened eleven times—I restart that day’s walk after recovery, so I capture a full consistent record.

I: Wow—knocked over eleven times on one street? How do you manage that risk?

CH: It’s part of my fine art practice. Risk is integral. I used to do free-running, but it needed that extra addition of blindfoldedness. I ensure I can recover and record. If I’m hospitalised, that day’s walk is nullified and retried once I heal.

I: You’re taking these walks across London. What’s your diary like during the project?

CH: Not just London, any city that catches my fancy. Each morning I wake with a strong urge to “feel the city.” I then walk—usually blindfolded—for hours, guided by instinct, heavy‑metal energy, and urban sounds. My diary is sporadic—sometimes a philosophical note before departure, sometimes a simple list after.

I: Are your installations solely the canvases with transcriptions, or does the walk itself function as a performance?

CH: It’s both. The live, unsighted walk through city traffic is the performance. The canvas becomes its physical residue—objectifying all the collisions and near‑misses into something to study and experience vicariously.

I: You mentioned walking on stilts in Camden while blindfolded. What kinds of rituals or props do you use during your walks?

CH: One idea is blindfolded stilts, halfway between absurdity and spectacle. I even hired someone to shout “HE’S NOT MAD, HE’S MAKING ART” at people who get too close.

I: That’s theatrical! What happens if someone intervenes while you’re blind?

CH: Interventions become part of the performance. Someone tries to help, I record that too. The city reacts to my vulnerability—it’s all material.

I: What does your next walk look like?

CH: Tomorrow I’ll be in Southend on Sea. Still blindfolded, maybe on stilts. I’m testing my limits, and the local drivers’ tolerance, again.

I: Finally, what do you hope people take away from your project?

CH: To feel the tension of trust—trusting yourself, the city, and the random. And to see art in hazard: the danger we walk through daily, often unthinking.

I: Thank you, Chester. Best of luck on your next escapade.

CH: Thanks.

Interview with Ptolemy Bognor-Regis: Chasing the Ultimate Painting

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In the shadow of great fortune and brighter genius, Ptolemy Bognor-Regis has emerged as one of the most talked-about figures in contemporary abstract art. The son of a shipping magnate turned media tycoon, Regis might have been content with a life of patronage or leisure—but instead, he’s hurled himself into the centre of artistic inquiry with a singular ambition: to create the last painting. The final word. The full stop of the visual age. We sat down with him to discuss his mission, his methods, and the piece he calls “A Bank Robbery in the Environs of Machynlleth.”

Interviewer: Ptolemy, first of all, thank you for making time for this interview. Your latest work is causing a stir—critics have called you “the Rothko of Wales” and it “an act of chromatic violence.” What do you see when you look at A Bank Robbery in the Environs of Machynlleth?

Ptolemy Bognor-Regis:

Thank you. What I see is the inside of a scream—a narrative collapsed into geometry. It’s not a painting of a bank robbery, obviously. It’s a record of the tension before and after such an event. The colour fields are characters. The orange is the alarm. The purple, a kind of communal numbness. The black shapes? They’re decisions, heavy with consequence.

Interviewer: There’s a boldness to your use of negative space. In this piece, the forms press against each other but never quite resolve. Is that intentional?

Regis:

Absolutely. Resolution is the enemy of truth. I’m not here to make peace on canvas—I’m here to expose the war beneath it. The non-resolution is the story. Harmony would be a betrayal of what I’m trying to capture.

Interviewer: You’ve described your artistic goal as “striving after the ultimate painting, after which nothing more can be said.” That’s a monumental ambition. Where does that come from?

Regis:

It comes from impatience, honestly. Impatience with repetition, with the saturation of half-statements in art. I grew up surrounded by enormous wealth, which gave me access—but also a kind of nausea. When everything is possible, meaning becomes slippery. I paint to locate meaning again. To pin it down once and for all, and then be done with it. After the final painting, there should be silence. A holy hush.

Interviewer: That sounds spiritual.

Regis:

It is. But not religious. I think of painting like monastic labor. Endless refinement, shaving away noise, until you hit the essential chord. One brushstroke away from revelation, always.

Interviewer: You’ve said you don’t use assistants, despite having the resources. Why?

Regis:

Because the images record my hesitation, doubt, and triumph. No assistant can fake that. I don’t want a painting that looks clean—I want one that’s wounded. That’s something you have to do yourself. Otherwise it’s merely decoration.

Interviewer: There’s a lot of speculation about your process. Some say you work in total darkness and then assess the result later. Is that true?

Regis (laughs):

Yes. And no. I do draw blind sometimes, but not always in darkness. It’s about trust—trust in the materials, trust in the moment. It’s like holding your breath underwater and waiting for the exact second the body tells you: Now. Draw that.

Interviewer: Looking ahead, do you believe the “final painting” is near?

Regis:

Some days I think I’ve already made it and just haven’t realized. Other days, I think I’m still a thousand lifetimes away. But I’ll keep trying. That’s all I can do.

Interviewer: What’s next for you?

Regis:

Silence. Reading. And perhaps that mythical final work.

A Bank Robbery in the Environs of Machynlleth is currently on view at Pimlico Wilde, London.