Life in Death is the most comprehensive collection to date of work by artist Rebecca Louise Law. The book documents the evolution of Law's unique artistic practice, the use of flowers as preserved sculptural material. A journey through the earliest experiments, to her best known immersive installations, via a series of beautifully documented photographs. It also provides a unique insight into the life and influences of the artist, including an introduction written by Law. The title culminates with exclusive imagery of Life in Death, Law's forthcoming exhibition showcasing a sculptural installation at the heart of Kew's Shirley Sherwood Gallery, which pays homage to the expertise in preservation presented throughout Kew's collections and represents a symbol of natural durability which is central to Law's practice. Life in Death runs from 7 October 2017 - 11 March 2018 in the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

This publication presents 300 recently realized collages by Czech artist Eva Kotatkova (born 1982). This new body of work is presented as having been compiled from an imaginary schoolbook from the 1980s, when the artist was growing up in Prague, under the totalitarian regime of that decade. The images--which often feature drawn embellishments by Kotatkova--largely consist of children playing games or interacting with various other collaged components, such as anatomical parts, or being manipulated as puppets. Kotatkova thus dramatizes relationships between people, ideas and objects in elaborate psycho-physical dramas redolent of the writings of Franz Kafka or Miroslav Holub. Interspersed among the collages are installation photographs and related documentation. Kotatkova studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, and was acclaimed in "The Guardian" (UK) as a highlight of the 2013 Venice Biennale ("The Encyclopedic Palace").

Since studying with Anthony Gormley and Timm Ulrichs, Josef Rainer (*1970) has created an artistic world theatre made up of incidental and overlooked things, in which perspectives and proportions communicate, big things move out of view, and small things appear on the stage. In his new book, the honeycomb architecture of bees, shrunken human beings in urban surroundings, speaking busts, and reading primates encounter one another. Supplemented by forays into mythology, the history of human development, science, and politics, all of this forms the material for a wondrous 'art chamber' in book form. Text in English, German and Italian.

Our homes contain us, but they are also within us. They can represent places to be ourselves, to recollect childhood memories, or to withdraw into adult spaces of intimacy; they can be sites for developing rituals, family relationships, and acting out cultural expectations. Like the personal, social, and cultural elements out of which they are constructed, homes can be not only comforting, but threatening too. The home is a rich theme running through post-war western art, and it continues to engage contemporary artists today - yet it has been the subject of relatively little critical writing. Art and the Home: Comfort, Alienation and the Everyday is the first single-authored, up-to-date book on the subject. Imogen Racz provides a theme-led discussion about how the physical experience of the dwelling space and the psychological complexities of the domestic are manifested in art, focusing mainly on sculpture, installation and object-based practice; discussing the work and ideas of artists as diverse as Louise Bourgeois, Gordon Matta-Clark, George Segal and Cornelia Parker within their artistic and cultural contexts.

Zadok Ben-David's inspiration derives from nature, science, magic and illusion. From Evolution and Theory (1995), where he explores scientific discoveries, to the psychological installation Blackfield (2007), with thousands of flowers, and the magical The Other Side of Midnight (2013), which incorporates hundreds of insects, one of the characteristics of Ben-David's work is the use of multiplicity as an organising principle. He creates an alternate amplified viewing space where the relationship between viewer (human) and artwork (nature) is both sacred and destabilising. The new ongoing installation People I Saw but Never Met, features thousands of miniatures of people that he has photographed and drawn during his travels, suggesting ways in which we are both isolated yet always close together. Together with outdoor works, completed over a twenty-year period, this new book brings these four installations together for the first time, in all their magical detail.

Against Ambience diagnoses - in order to cure - the art world's recent turn toward ambience. Over the course of three short months - June to September, 2013 - the four most prestigious museums in New York indulged the ambience of sound and light: James Turrell at the Guggenheim, Soundings at MoMA, Robert Irwin at the Whitney, and Janet Cardiff at the Met. In addition, two notable shows at smaller galleries indicate that this is not simply a major-donor movement. Collectively, these shows constitute a proposal about what we wanted from art in 2013. While we're in the soft embrace of light, the NSA and Facebook are still collecting our data, the money in our bank accounts is still being used to fund who-knows-what without our knowledge or consent, the government we elected is still imprisoning and targeting people with whom we have no beef. We deserve an art that is the equal of our information age. Not one that parrots the age's self-assertions or modes of dissemination, but an art that is hyper-aware, vigilant, active, engaged, and informed. We are now one hundred years clear of Duchamp's first readymades. So why should we find ourselves so thoroughly in thrall to ambience? Against Ambience argues for an art that acknowledges its own methods and intentions; its own position in the structures of cultural power and persuasion. Rather than the warm glow of light or the soothing wash of sound, Against Ambience proposes an art that cracks the surface of our prevailing patterns of encounter, initiating productive disruptions and deconstructions.

This book documents seven installation-performances by American sculptor and photographer Corin Hewitt (born 1971), from 2007. The extensive collection of images--including preparatory sketches, process shots, exhibition documentation and discrete photographic works--constitutes a rich, comprehensive study of Hewitt's oeuvre.

Interactive Installation Art can promote behavior change by altering brainwave state, increasing creativity, disrupting cultural habits and improving neurochemistry.

Graffiti made from cake icing, man-made clouds floating indoors, a luminous moon resting on water. Collected here are dozens of jaw-dropping artworks-site-specific installations, extraordinary sculptures and groundbreaking interventions in public spaces-that reveal the exciting things that happen when contemporary artists play with the idea of place. Unexpected Art showcases the wonderfully experimental work of more than 50 innovative artists from around the world in galleries of their most astonishing artworks. An unusual package with three different-coloured page edges complements the art inside and makes this tour of the world's most mind-blowing artwork a beautiful and thoughtprovoking gift for anyone interested in the next cool thing.

This unique reflection on the world of Robert Burns places a range of photographic artworks by celebrated Scottish artist Calum Colvin alongside poems written in response to each work by 'weel-kent' Scots poet Rab Wilson. Colvin's multi-referential artworks are concerned with the very process of looking, perceiving and interpreting. The potential meaning of any individual piece is intrinsically linked to the viewer's personal deconstruction of the image. Utilising the unique fixed-point perspective of the camera, Colvin creates and records manipulated and constructed images in order to create elaborate narratives which meditate on numerous aspects of Scottish culture, identity and the human condition in the early 21st century. At times witty, controversial and tender, the images are presented alongside poems in response by Rab Wilson which equally reflect on the life and aspects of Burns to dwell on who we are, and where we have been, toward what we may become. As Burns reflected through his art the world he inhabited, these works and words strive to reflect on a myriad of contemporary concerns.

LAND ART IN THE U.K.

A new book on land art in Great Britain. There are chapters on land artists such as Chris Drury, Hamish Fulton, David Nash, Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy. All of the major practitioners of land and environmental art in the U.K. are discussed.

EXTRACT FROM THW CHAPTER ON ANDY GOLDSWORTHY

One wonders whether Andy Goldsworthy would like to work in snow and ice more than in any other medium. In temperate snowlands one feels Goldsworthy is very much at home. Snow has all the right sorts of qualities Goldsworthy looks for in a material: it is malleable, it melts and changes, its whiteness makes for good, contrasty imagery photographically, and it seasonally alters the landscape, and later dissolves into it.

In Goldsworthy s snowworks one senses also the sheer fun working with snow. For people in most of Britain, snow is not a occurrence each year, as it is in, say, Northern Russia or Alaska. Snow can be an exciting event (but British adults usually gripe it). Snow was a perennial delight and shock for Goldsworthy. In Midsummer Snowballs he wrote that e]ven in winter each snowfall is a shock, unpredictable and unexpected.

Goldsworthy retained the child-like enjoyment of snow falling in Britain throughout his life. While much of the U.K. grinds to a halt at the sight of a snowflake, Goldsworthy has the child s joy when it snows (school s cancelled, snowball fights, ice skating, sledging, and making snowmen and snowballs).

Andy Goldsworthy speaks in wonder and awe of the effect, the excitement of the first snowfall. Some of this excitement comes across in Goldsworthy s snowworks. He has made, for example, patterns in the snow by rolling a snowball around a field, exactly as kids do when it snows (1982 and 1987).

Some of Goldsworthy s earliest works with snow were large snowballs. In some of these early snow pieces, Goldsworthy placed snowballs in areas such as woods and fields which didn t have any snow, so the snowballs stood out in the trees and grass (as in Ilkley, Yorkshire, 1981).

Wiebke Siem (1954 Kiel, DE – Berlin, DE) became known in the 1990s for extensive installations in which she alienated everyday objects, such as pieces of clothing, shoes, bags, or toys, or transformed them into oversized objects. Wiebke Siems uses pieces of furniture, objects, and materials with domestic connotations and whimsical, often puppet-like figures to create psychologically charged installations that are as oppressive as they are humorous and that raise questions about societal role models. Siem’s art repeatedly employs a formal language and a mode of presentation that refer to ethnological objects and collections. This enables her to comment on Modernism’s problematic appropriation strategies toward non-European art. In addition to borrowing motifs from art and cultural history, Siem critically engages the mechanisms of the male-dominated art business – a central theme in her oeuvre.

This book explains why Edge of the Trees is such a special place. It explains how this contemporary work of art came to be located on the site of the first Government House built in Sydney. It examines the impact of the work, its significance to the Aboriginal community, and its success as a work of art in a public place.

Stone Talks brings together poems and four talks/essays by noted poet Alyson Hallett on the subject of stones, rocks, somatics and our relationship with our environment. The book invites us to listen again to the world around us - the world of rocks and trees and sky and stars and sea that we participate in and that participates in us. It reawakens a childlike curiosity in us, makes connections that we had forgotten, and gives us permission to experience the world in an embodied and vibrant way that was drummed out of the rest of us long ago. The book starts with an essay on KInship inspired by Donna Haraway's ideas about how we must make relationships of kin with all things, including what she refers to as `critters’. In it, Alyson explores the twin ideas of embodied reading and embodied walking. How, exactly, can we embody the ideas in a book? Here, the author "dives into kinship with the decomposed bodies of plankton, plants and animals whose liquidation created that beautiful, black viscous gold we call oil". In the title essay, Stone Talks, Alyson revisits the keynote lecture she gave at the `In Other Tongues’ symposium at Dartington. In it she explores her lived experience of being talked to and guided in her life by stones. She examines the ideas of obedience and yielding, the body as a wilderness, and unfolds a walked artwork with stones that she undertook soon after her father died. In Haunted Landscapes, Alyson explores the marks and traces of our own and others' lives that inhabit our bodies and experience. Wandering into quantum physics, she asks questions that "set me afloat on a fathomless sea". Finally, in The Stone Monologues, Alyson embarks on a quest to "understand myself not as a single thing, a single point, but rather a constellation, a layered interruption in time comprising everyone and everything I encounter". Alyson Hallett has received Arts Council awards for her work. She is a Hawthornden Fellow, works part-time for the Royal Literary Fund and loves collaborating with other artists and scientists. She has a doctorate in poetry with research into geographical intimacy. In Stone Talks, she shares some of what she is learning from stones. She talks “from the mud. From the earth. From the place we haunt and are haunted by.� The talking is exquisite.

Celestial mechanics have fascinated mankind in all known cultures. Many artists throughout history have been captivated by the spectacle we observe above us day and night. Swiss photographer Guido Baselgia has expanded the focus of his work on the sky, with the stellar and solar movements and phenomena as we see them from earth. In his most recent work Light Fall, Baselgia makes traceable the trajectory of celestial bodies invisible to the human eye and shows astounding occurrences of light and shadow. Taken in Norway, the Tierra del Fuego archipelago in Argentina, in Ecuador, and the Swiss Alps, the images visualise the geometry of astrodynamics and celestial mechanics. His photography also captures the phenomenon of umbra, planet earth's shadow thrown into space. The new book Guido Baselgia - Light Fall features 80 stunning tritone plates. Complemented with essays by German scholar Andrea Gnam and Swiss photography critic Nadine Olonetzky, they offer a window into the light phenomena that leave us awestruck today as much as they did our ancestors.

Jan Hendrix is a Dutch-born, Mexico-based contemporary artist. His work is all about observation and analysis; nature and its diff erent ways of representing and telling extended stories, often in a non- linear narrative. Based on an exhibition at Kew Gardens, this book is a visual report of Hendrix's multiple visits to the Kamay Botany Bay Area of New South Wales, Australia, made over a 20-year period. Beautiful and thought-provoking works convey his response to the fragile, changing landscape, under constant threat of fi re and destruction. His work also draws on first collections of plants at Kamay Botany Bay documented by botanists Joseph Banks, Daniel Solander and Sydney Parkinson as part of the HMS Endeavour expedition in 1770. Supporting texts by Art Historian Dawn Ades, CEO of the Bundanon Trust Deborah Ely, and filmmaker Michael Leggett contextualise the work of the artist. With a foreword by Kew Director Richard Deverell.

Our homes contain us, but they are also within us. They can represent places to be ourselves, to recollect childhood memories, or to withdraw into adult spaces of intimacy; they can be sites for developing rituals, family relationships, and acting out cultural expectations. Like the personal, social, and cultural elements out of which they are constructed, homes can be not only comforting, but threatening too. The home is a rich theme running through post-war western art, and it continues to engage contemporary artists today - yet it has been the subject of relatively little critical writing. Art and the Home: Comfort, Alienation and the Everyday is the first single-authored, up-to-date book on the subject. Imogen Racz provides a theme-led discussion about how the physical experience of the dwelling space and the psychological complexities of the domestic are manifested in art, focusing mainly on sculpture, installation and object-based practice; discussing the work and ideas of artists as diverse as Louise Bourgeois, Gordon Matta-Clark, George Segal and Cornelia Parker within their artistic and cultural contexts.

Published on the occasion of Ali Kaaf's exhibition Ich bin ein Fremder. Zweifach Fremder at the Museum fur Islamische Kunst in the Pergamonmuseum Berlin, the catalogue documents the sculptural intervention created in the context of the Mschatta Facade. The eventful history of this icon of Islamic architectural culture is not only a metaphor for human existence, but also equally for the biography of the German-Syrian artist. The volume is augmented to include works on paper from past groups of works in the Rift series and Byzantine Corner, which illustrate Kaaf's intermedial working method. In subtle, abstract imagery, he works with layerings, incisions, burns, photography and digital image processing. Through the artistic exploration of breakages and reassemblages, complex spatial voids emerge that reflect both intercultural and internal processes.

Published to accompany MASS MoCA's landmark installation of LeWitt's innovative wall drawings, this book celebrates the artist and his illustrious 50-year career. Published in association with Mass MoCA Exhibition Schedule: Mass MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (opens November 16, 2008)

A timely photographic exploration of the role of holocaust memorials in Germany. With helpful text, for use by educators and in exhibitions.

The historical roots, key practitioners, and artistic, theoretical, and technological trends in the incorporation of new media into the performing arts. The past decade has seen an extraordinarily intense period of experimentation with computer technology within the performing arts. Digital media has been increasingly incorporated into live theater and dance, and new forms of interactive performance have emerged in participatory installations, on CD-ROM, and on the Web. In Digital Performance, Steve Dixon traces the evolution of these practices, presents detailed accounts of key practitioners and performances, and analyzes the theoretical, artistic, and technological contexts of this form of new media art. Dixon finds precursors to today's digital performances in past forms of theatrical technology that range from the deus ex machina of classical Greek drama to Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk (concept of the total artwork), and draws parallels between contemporary work and the theories and practices of Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism, Expressionism, Futurism, and multimedia pioneers of the twentieth century. For a theoretical perspective on digital performance, Dixon draws on the work of Philip Auslander, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, and others. To document and analyze contemporary digital performance practice, Dixon considers changes in the representation of the body, space, and time. He considers virtual bodies, avatars, and digital doubles, as well as performances by artists including Stelarc, Robert Lepage, Merce Cunningham, Laurie Anderson, Blast Theory, and Eduardo Kac. He investigates new media's novel approaches to creating theatrical spectacle, including virtual reality and robot performance work, telematic performances in which remote locations are linked in real time, Webcams, and online drama communities, and considers the "extratemporal" illusion created by some technological theater works. Finally, he defines categories of interactivity, from navigational to participatory and collaborative. Dixon challenges dominant theoretical approaches to digital performance-including what he calls postmodernism's denial of the new-and offers a series of boldly original arguments in their place.