Ugly beauty came over me like a thrilling rash.
Ugly beauty warmed me like a slap on the face.
Ugly beauty helped me rise above the crowd
and even if it meant sitting on the face
of the hunchback of Notre Dame
I quickly got over the obsolete shame.

Before the quakes, we thought of our Outer Spaces programme as something extra – a nice complement to all the art going on inside. At present, however, with the building still occupied, the Outer Spaces are our Only Spaces, and any new addition to them counts for a lot more than it might have a year ago.

This article first appeared in The Press as 'An Ode to Yertle the Turtle' on 13 May 2015.

For many years, the piercing whistle of the railway workshops off Blenheim Road was Addington's alarm clock.

Here's a little from behind the scenes. Shifting Lines opens tomorrow, 9 November, and runs until 19 January 2014. It's a show about drawing as an idea, which is permitted here to take very different forms. It includes work by six artists – Andrew Beck, Peter Trevelyan, Katie Thomas, Pip Culbert, Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano – all of whom use line to investigate space and structure in unexpected ways.

As a supplement to the article in today's Press GO section, highlighting the recent purchase of Ivy Fife's Untitled (Towards Worcester Street from St. Elmo Courts), here's a modest selection of paintings of rooftops, backyards and urban scapes from the collection...

This article first appeared as 'Hello and goodbye' in The Press on 5 October 2012.

This article first appeared in The Press on 13 October 2004

Laurence Stephen Lowry painted Factory at Widnes in 1956, at which time he was Britain's most famous living painter. Lowry's fame increased in that year as he became the subject of a BBC television documentary, though his work had already been popular in British homes and schools as reproductions since the end of the war. If appreciation for his individualistic painting style was widespread, there was also fascination with L.S. Lowry the artist, who had projected in the press the image of a lonely recluse.