By Sam Nallen Copley © Amartey Golding Contemporary art often sets out to polarise: post-modernist deliberate abstraction and laboured attempts to push boundaries versus ethnocentric pious anti-avant-garde conservatism. Although we hit this stalemate many years ago, clichés of what exactly constitutes…

By Sam Nallen Copley The birth of art Fifty-thousand years ago, a Neanderthal in what became south-eastern Spain took a seashell, coloured it with goethite and fashioned it into a necklace. Life was hard in the Middle Paleolithic Period, and if this…

By Sam Nallen Copley The Great Wave off Kanagawa  Around 180 years ago, Tokitarō (the birth name of Katsushika Hokusai), an elderly man from Eastern Japan embarked on a new project. His second wife had just passed away, his first having…