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Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Articles Available Online


The Pious and the Pommery

Essay

Issue No. 18

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   Where is the champagne? On second thoughts this is not entirely the right question. The champagne is in the ice trough, on...

Essay

April 2019

Ariana and the Lesbian Narcissus

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

April 2019

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching. A lot....

The limestone statue of the diamond trader, imperialist and racist Cecil Rhodes that adorns the façade of Oxford’s Oriel College (where only one Black British A-level student has been admitted since 2010) has an impossibly large head This kind of synecdochical oversizing of the head, and often the hands too, has a long heritage in classical sculpture: Michelangelo’s David is but one example A large head contains an expansive mind; large hands do great things Rhodes’s supersized finger points outwards and toward a prosperous future for the ‘finest race in the world’, which – according to him – was the Anglo-Saxon race But this hand also points downwards to where he would have fallen, had Oriel College not rejected campaigners’ call to remove the statue   To build individuals in stone is to ask the landscape to be forever defined by them To build individuals in stone is to submit to a belief in the unwavering infallibility of genius, of bravery, of accomplishment For many, tearing down statues is a Soviet thing, an Isis thing, a totalitarian-authoritarian thing; it is extreme, whereas Oxford, they think, is not   Nicolas Party, the Swiss artist whose site-specific installation Speakers is currently on show at Modern Art Oxford’s Piper Gallery, reads the city’s architecture as imbued with ‘a masculine energy’ In response, Party has sculpted five enormous women’s heads to acknowledge the work of the city’s notable women Two metres high and like milliner’s dummies, the heads were designed on 3D-printers before being fashioned from plaster and placed inside the small gallery, whose walls have been painted orange Vibrancy is Party’s strength: he is known for his bright, blobby still lifes and landscape paintings One head has a violet face and slick green hair, another is Pepto-Bismol pink with raspberry lips The women look out in different directions, and on closer inspection, their apparently neutral expressions admit boredom, wry amusement, incredulity   Speakers is based on the Emperor Heads, thirteen stone busts that encircle Oxford’s seventeenth-century Sheldonian Theatre The identities of the busts remain unknown, and while their laurel wreaths might make them philosophers or apostles, enigmatic Oxford

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Ten Years at Garage Moscow

Art Review

November 2018

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art Review

November 2018

When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of...
Becoming Alice Neel

Art

August 2017

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel was the Matisse of the...

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poetry

Issue No. 19

Two Poems

Sophie Robinson

poetry

Issue No. 19

sweet sweet agency   the candy here is hard & filled & there is nothing i love more than...

Interview

February 2011

Interview with David Vann

Marissa Cox

Interview

February 2011

I am a little apprehensive about meeting David Vann for the first time. His father committed suicide when David...

Art

December 2016

Bonnie Camplin: Is it a Crime to Love a Prawn

Bonnie Camplin

Art

December 2016

  The title of Bonnie Camplin’s exhibition at 3236RLS Gallery, ‘Is it a Crime to Love a Prawn’, brings...

 

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