The volcanoes on the Alaska Peninsula and the fifty-seven volcanoes that project into the Aleutian Islands form the northern rim of the Pacific Ring of Fire. Many are in Alaska’s national parks, monuments, and preserves. They continue to erupt, creating new Earth surfaces, and the deposits of lava, pumice, and ash ejected by these volcanoes create primeval ground: a true wilderness where few people on Earth other than volcanologists have traversed. Gary Freeburg has wandered and lived among Alaska’s volcanoes for regular periods during the last twenty years. The volcanoes he visits are alive and in some cases still steaming, and its lands are coarse and free of distraction: a vacuum of emptiness that embraces solitude and silence stirred only by the winds that blow and the rains that fall. The Earth surfaces that he walks are hard and largely barren of plant life, except where surfaces are shielded by the wind or are near water sources. There, new life returns in the form of lichen and tiny plants and insects and animals—bees, bear, fox, mayflies, and Alaskan hares—taking their rightful place in these vast, remote national parks, monuments, and preserves, reminding us that they are signs of hope that Earth will continue to evolve, regenerate, and renew itself long after we humans are gone.Freeburg’s writings, photographs, and drawings reflect what it is like to seek solitude and live among Alaska’s wild volcanoes. His travels were mostly solo treks in which he was flown in with supplies, a camera, sketchbooks, and journal to share his thoughts and artistically render his experiences. Each day spent in Alaska’s volcanic wilderness affirmed the importance of this place for the author and those who can only dream of such a place. His book seems to explain: How fortunate it is to have magical places and national parks like Alaska’s volcanoes, how fortunate we are to be alive on this magnificent Earth.

This richly illustrated and superbly designed book explores its author’s life and work against the backdrop of 40 years of transformation and conflict across the Arabian Gulf and Islamic world. A doctor-turned-artist, Ahmed Mater has continually confronted his traditional context. Here he explores Arab and Islamic society in an era of globalization and social upheaval to uncover the unofficial histories that have shaped the present. Mapping his life and work on a historical timeline, the book offers an unprecedented insight into changes forged by and in the Kingdom, and its significance in world religion, culture, and geopolitics. Celebrating 20 years of Mater’s art-making, organizing, and activism, this book is not only a mid-career survey of an essential artist, it is an urgent prognosis of a society in dramatic transition.

Barney McKenna – “Banjo Barney from Donnycarney” – was one of the founder-members of the Dubliners, the world-famous Irish folk musicians and singers who in 2002 celebrated forty years on the road as a band. For Dubliners fans, Barney’s name immediately conjures up the image of the burly, bearded banjo genius whodazzled the audience with his virtuosity while charming them with his folksy, no-nonsense personality. However, Barney was also well known for another reason: he was capable of bringing any conversation to a sudden stop by uttering something so completely unexpected, and at the same time so incomprehensible, as to reduceeveryone present to a bemused silence. These surreal verbal gems, collected in this book, have become known simply as “Barneyisms”.

For more than six decades John Faulkner has been at the heart of British and Irish music-making, as a singer, songwriter, composer, musician, producer and film-maker. Storm in My Heart is John’s highly personal account of his life in music, from his childhood in wartime London, through his years in the English folk explosion and on to life in Ireland as a significant player in the traditional music scene. In a lifetime’s journey John falls under the influence of Ewan McColl and Peggy Seeger, marries tempestuous singer Dolores Keane, and moves to County Galway where he brings his words and music to the world. He has an international number one success with ‘Lion in a Cage’, his campaigning tribute to the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, whom he subsequently meets. In this honest and witty memoir John recalls his work with Frankie Gavin, Alec Finn, John Prine and others, revealing the dark arts of the Irish music business while revelling in the freewheeling delights of a life devoted to performing. Storm in My Heart is a clear-eyed chronicle by one of Ireland’s finest artists.Storm in My Heart includes QR codes to a curated selection of John Faulkner’s best loved music.

Louis de Wet (1930–2018) was an artistphilosopher born in South Africa. Over the course of his life, he created a significant body of meticulously crafted drawings and paintings, using the techniques of the Old Masters to express a contemporary world. This publication, authored by his wife Gabrielle Drake, brings together de Wet’s full catalogue of works with detailed biographical information and recollections from those who knew and worked with him. In 1983, along with his wife, de Wet bought Wenlock Abbey in Shropshire, part of an eleventhcentury priory that was the daughter house of the great Burgundian abbey of Cluny. Considering the house to be his destiny, de Wet served it faithfully, restoring and refurbishing it over the course of thirtyfive years. Wenlock Abbey helped develop de Wet’s artistic vision, substantiating his belief that the best from the past should inform, but not inhibit the future. He enhanced the fabric of the abbey with his own artworks, including a complete scheme of frescoed images of Old and New Testament figures in the chapel, as well as designs for the carved capitals of the oak screen he had inserted there. These capitals are a geographical biography, each carving showing a place of significance in de Wet’s life.This book takes the capitals as its guide, and is organised around the places de Wet lived in during the course of his life: Africa, London, Paris and Wenlock Abbey. Each section starts with pictures of the relevant capital, and includes a biographical overview written by Gabrielle Drake and reproductions of de Wet’s drawings and paintings from that period. There are also facsimiles of his Parisian sketchbook and his fastidiously compiled paint colour book.In additional text contributions, local architectural historian Vivien Bellamy details her personal recollections of de Wet and his extraordinary vision for the house; the architect Andrew Arrol outlines his renovation work on the property; and Christophe Voros, the Director of the Fédération des Sites Clunisiens, recalls his first meeting with de Wet and Gabrielle in 2000, as well as their long collaboration together.Louis de Wet (1930–2018) was born in South Africa and studied at the Beaux Arts and La Grande Chaumière, Paris, before taking British citizenship and settling in London. He remained there for thirty years, drawing, painting, studying and developing his ideas in his studio while travelling extensively around Europe and showing his work in various exhibitions. In 1983, along with his wife, de Wet bought Wenlock Abbey in Shropshire, which he faithfully restored until his death in 2018. It is now home to the Louis de Wet Foundation, which was established to preserve the abbey and offer cultural opportunities.

The botanical drawings of the American naturalist William Bartram.

A new addition to the University of Pittsburgh Press award winning Culture Politics & the Built Environment series

Imagine walking among and learning about 130 ancient cities in 25 countries across the world: from the Mediterranean to the Middle East, from Asia to the Americas. Some are world heritage sites, accessible to tens of thousands of visitors each year, and some are remote and seldom seen. But each ancient city from the distant past conveys a special place in the history of human civilization, and each presents its own story and sense of place. In Unforgotten: Ancient Cities from a Distant Past, William Frej presents 200 duotone photographs of these ancient cities that are simply unforgettable, capturing as they do their allure, their beauty, their spirit and resonating sense of space. Anne Frej, in her elegant introduction, sets the table for the personal journey that awaits every reader—a journey into deep history and magical architecture and geographical splendor that speaks to us today. And Michael E. Smith, a noted scholar and author, writes about the lessons to be learned from these ancient cities, including his insights into the various urban traditions behind the building of the cities and why their histories remain poignant.As readers explore the ruins and remnants of these amazing ancient cities, a sense of awe and wonder is ever-present. Yet so is the knowledge that human civilization and life on Earth, no matter how grand, is tenuous and fragile. Even as these places reached their apogee and influence in the distant past, there are reasons why these places were abandoned and replaced. So let your curiosity wander as you turn each page, for you will see in words and pictures why they should not be forgotten.

Henry Ward (b.1971) is an artist, educator and writer based in London. This monograph documents a major new body of work created during and following a residency at the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, Connecticut, in 2023, and a subsequent residency in the Morvan, Burgundy, in summer 2024. Ward is interested in line, shape, form and colour relationships. He works primarily as a painter, but also makes drawings and small sculptures. He explores the language of paint by investigating the threshold between abstraction and representation. During the two months he spent at the Albers Foundation, Ward took advantage of the vast studio space and began pinning together cut painted pieces to make assemblages. While there, he produced fifteen paintings on canvas and wood, forty paintings on paper, sixty drawings, twenty ‘cut-outs’ and a full sketchbook. Exclusively working with acrylic paints, he began experimenting, using masking tape and mixing in different mediums so that he could ‘push the paint around’.The publication includes reproductions of many the works Ward made during his stay at the Albers Foundation, organised into ‘Paintings’, ‘Works on Paper’ and ‘Drawings’. The final section, ‘After Bethany’, brings together twenty-two acrylic paintings on canvas that the artist created the following year, including during a two-week residency in France.In his foreword, Fritz Horstman, Education Director of the Albers Foundation, sets the scene in Bethany, detailing the studio buildings and the rural winter landscape, as well as Ward’s ‘exciting path of exploration and growth’ during his time there. While in residence, Ward travelled to nearby New York to meet the artist Amy Sillman in her Brooklyn studio. An edited transcript of their conversation is included here, in which they discuss their individual approaches to painting, writing and language. In his essay, the curator and writer Jonathan Watkins charts Ward’s thirty-year career as an artist and teacher, drawing out his belief that ‘art is, by its very nature, educational’. In her contribution, Jenni Lomax interviewed Ward in his Woolwich studio about the works he created during both residencies, and the lasting impact they have had on his practice.Edited by Matt Price and designed by Joe Gilmore, the book is published by Anomie Publishing, London.

Barbara Hepworth: Strings is the first publication dedicated to the artist’s stringed sculptures, paintings and drawings. In 1939, Hepworth (1903–1975) made her first sculpture threaded with strings. For the rest of her career, she intermittently combined string with works made from plaster, wood, metal and stone. These were some of her most personally distinctive artistic achievements. Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the artist’s death, Barbara Hepworth: Strings provides for the first time a comprehensive thematic account of string in the artist’s work, exploring the different ways that she used it and the symbolism she invested it with.This publication includes a fully-illustrated catalogue of Piano Nobile’s accompanying exhibition. It features essays by some of the leading specialists on Hepworth’s work. The exhibition co-curator Michael Regan offers a personal response to the stringed sculptures and considers their affective quality. In his essay, Dr Stephen Feeke explores fresh perspectives and previously unpublished source materials relating to Hepworth and string. A further text by Eleanor Clayton, senior curator at The Hepworth Wakefield, gives a close reading of the most significant stringed works including the artist’s celebrated commission for John Lewis’s flagship store on Oxford Street. The book also includes a comprehensive, illustrated list of Hepworth’s stringed sculptures.

“Animation” implies that the image or figural object is alive, endowed with anima: a “soul”, “spirit” or “vital principle.” In the Middle Ages, holy or emphatically unholy imagery often possessed an ability to come to life, to act and do things, to move and gesticulate, to speak and exude. This “life” might be a result of natural or supernatural principles; it might be a work of magic, a work of mechanics or a miracle (a divine work). This book is about the different modes of animation that made medieval images perform their spectacular wonders of locomotion and physical transformation, ranging from mechanical machinery to magical conjuration and miraculous ensoulment. Talking and bleeding crucifixes are investigated alongside robot Redeemers, weeping Madonnas, automated devils and self-propelled statues – “statuas animatas” – that enacted their visible and audible animations in monasteries and churches, in historical technologies and treatises, in theurgical tales and demonologies. With its confessed reinvigoration of animism, this book will animate anyone with an interest in medieval art and art history, culture, ideas, religion, anthropology, philosophy and theology.

Carl Nielsen (1865-1931) occupies a prominent place among European modern composers of the early twentieth century. He represents the generation of Richard Strauss, Ferruccio Busoni, Jean Sibelius and Gustav Mahler. His music is performed all over the world. With Carl Nielsen. A Cultural Biography, for the first time a thoroughly researched, all-encompassing biography of Nielsen is available for international readers. Carl Nielsen took part in the lively cultural circles in Copenhagen in the late nineteenth century at a time when Scandinavian authors were fashionable in all of Europe. He travelled extensively throughout his life – and kept a firm connection to his cultural heritage. As a cultural biography the book introduces to music and cultural life in the Danish capital of Copenhagen and to cultural activities among ordinary people into the farthest corner of the countryside.

“Pulse is essential to life. Everything we do as humans is influenced by the phenomenon of rhythm.”The Hildebrandt Method is about rhythm – or more precisely polyrhythm. A polyrhythm is the rhythmic pattern that results when two or more independent rhythm or tempo layers are played simultaneously. Polyrhythms are used in virtually every culture throughout the world, from Polynesian folk music to Beethoven symphonies, and from avant-garde compositions to jazz, pop and electronica.This book presents a polyrhythmic method that guides the reader through the jungle of polyrhythms, equipping them with tools to understand and execute even the most challenging constellations of rhythms.The Hildebrandt Method sets new standards of what is possible within the field of polyrhythms. Through analyses of rhythm structures, polyrhythm is presented in a new and simplified light. The method is for anyone who wishes to improve their polyrhythmic ability.

Anna Freeman Bentley (b. 1982) is an artist based in London. Her painting practice explores the built environment, architecture and interiors, inviting emotive, psychological and semiotic readings of space. This publication, Complete Reality, documents Freeman Bentley’s latest series of paintings, which she created after visiting the film set for My Driver and I (2024), a coming-of-age drama set in the port city of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia.Over the course of the shoot, Freeman Bentley took over two thousand photographs, which she edited and worked from in her London studio. The paintings show lavish rooms, filled with fringed lamps, dusty chandeliers, vast mirrors and ornate furniture, juxtaposed with the incongruous signs of a film set: screens, leads, computers and plastic chairs. Exploring the relationship between ‘reality’ and ‘fabrication’, the series continues the artist’s interest in spaces that have an inherent tension or transience.Alongside the paintings that comprise Complete Reality, the publication also includes a series of oil studies on paper that explore additional rooms, angles and spaces from the film set. Installation images of the artist’s most recent solo exhibitions – Video Village at MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique, Paris (2024), make shift at Monica de Cardenas, Zuoz (2024), and Complete Reality at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles (2024–25) – showcase the works staged in different configurations and gallery environments.In her introduction, Jennifer Higgie considers the interiority of Freeman Bentley’s elusive scenes, and her interest in temporary and unreal spaces. The curator and writer Elisabetta Fabrizi interviews Freeman Bentley about the interplay of reality and illusion in her paintings. They reflect on themes of authenticity and narrative tension, and discuss Freeman Bentley’s earlier explorations of cinema, particularly Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979). Kathryn Lloyd writes about the conceptual and historical relationships between cinema, photography and painting. She analyses how Freeman Bentley forges an interdependence between these three distinct media, creating an unmistakably painterly language that somehow distils the essence of both film and photography.In an interview with Michele Robecchi, the artist discusses her recent solo exhibition in Switzerland, make shift. Freeman Bentley reflects on her personal connections to the work, the significance of the temporary and transitory nature of the film set and her use of triptychs, mirrors and fragmentation to disrupt conventional readings of space. In her contribution, the film producer Georgie Paget offers a speculative film script based on the exhibition Video Village at MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique, Paris.Edited by Matt Price and designed by Joanna Deans, the book is published by Anomie Publishing, London.

Material and visual culture of China’s long 19th century is understandably overshadowed by the traumatic warfare, land shortages, famines and uprisings which impacted the lives of a population of around 400 million people. However, innovation can be seen in material culture (including print, painting, calligraphy, textiles, fashion, jewellery, ceramics, lacquer, glass, arms and armour, rugs, silver, money, and photography) during a century in which China’s art, literature, crafts and technology faced unprecedented exposure to global influences. Despite this however, until recently, the 19th century in China has been often defined – and dismissed – as an era of cultural decline. Building on the critically acclaimed British Museum exhibition China’s hidden century: 1796–1912, this publication seeks to redefine perceptions about 19th-century Qing arts. Essays by some of the world’s leading authorities on Qing culture reveal the social, cultural, religious, creative, economic and political history of makers, users, owners and collectors. Areas of focus include painting and patronage; calligraphy and seal carving; commerce and fashion; and craft technology and technology ensuring that the book will be a manual for the arts of China’s long 19th century.