Category: Australia
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Katoomba
Katoomba or: nature sold as amusement park Come and discover the Scenic World of Katoomba in the Blue Mountains! With the Scenic Skyway (photo) one moves at 270 metres above the floor of the Jamison Valley in the highest cable car in Australia! If next you don’t go down into the valley with the Scenic…
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Gimcracks and knickknacks
Gimcracks and knickknacks or: a girl’s paradise An entire shop full of trinkets against a background of pink wall cloth and a tiger-like stripe pattern on the floor: a truly mouth-watering temptation! In Dutch we have the nice word ‘snuisterijen’ for this kind of trinkets, containing the two vowel sounds ‘ui’ and ‘ij’ that non-native speakers…
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Moloch horridus
Moloch horridus This ‘grotesque Australian reptile’ – in the words of my Oxford Dictionary – is popularly called thorny devil or thorny dragon. I think its official name – Moloch horridus – sounds more horrid than the popular one. Here’s what I read in my friend Jane’s reptile book: “the Moloch horridus is the sole member of…
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Desert art
Desert art Drawings in the sand through the interplay of wind and sturdy desert grass. Using the grass-stalks as a compass, the wind has drawn circles around each plant. At first they must have been very faint, but after days and days of strong wind from different directions they are now clearly visible, engraved in…
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Kata Tjuta
Kata Tjuta or: What’s in a name? Looking from the red planet Mars at the red continent Australia on planet Earth we may be able to see, with the best available telescope, an image like you’ll find here (please click), on a picture made by NASA. From that far we perceive a group of heavily eroded bulges…
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My Red Homeland
My Red Homeland It’s not easy to write sense about art. I tried my best in last week’s post regarding another work by Anish Kapoor, but I’ll take it a bit more easy this time and quote some lines from the booklet that was distributed at the exhibition in Sydney in 2013. “My Red Homeland is a…
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Please do not touch
Please do not touch Anish Kapoor calls this work of his “Laboratory for a New Model of the Universe – 2006”. This sounds intriguing, maybe a bit over the top, although maybe with a touch of humour too. Who will tell us? Anyhow, it is what it is: an acrylic bloc of 123x134x132.7 cm, with…
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Before sunset
Before sunset A catamaran is blocking my view of the sun, which is about to set over the Indian Ocean. But the very last rays of sunlight manage to penetrate beneath the boat’s raised floor, creating a faint reflection on the gently lapping waves. Similarly, but differently, in the photo below the rays of the…
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Non-objects
Non-objects My criticism of the large number of mirror works by Anish Kapoor in last week’s post, doesn’t do him justice sufficiently. He has made other, different works that deserve attention. Nevertheless I start here again with a distorting mirror work. Kapoor has named it a Non-Object, a title that fits many of his works…
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Distorting mirrors
Distorting mirrors I remember with delight the fun-fair that once a year pitched its tents in the small Dutch town in which I grew up. One of the attractions sometimes was a tent full of concave and convex mirrors in different sizes and combinations that showed the strangest, distorted reflections when one stood in front…
καιρός remembered 