Today is 200 years since the birth of John Ruskin. To mark the occasion, ITV visited Ruskin's Good Looking! exhibition at Brantwood.
The exhibition runs until April 7th. It features the drawings made through the Ruskin's Good Looking! project which used Ruskin's eithos of close looking through drawing to examine his own clothing. The exhibited drawings are hung in Brantwood's Blue Gallery in the heart of Ruskin's former home. They made on wax and depict studies of Ruskin's clothing life size.
This is what Brantwood says about the exhibtion:
" Ruskin used drawing to look closely at the world in order to better understand it. His method of ‘true topology’ involved intense scrutiny of a landscape leaving no stone unrecorded. For Ruskin’s Good Looking! Sarah Casey has applied this close attention to the more intimate landscape of Ruskin’s own clothing. As Anuradha Chatterjee writes in the exhibition catalogue, Ruskin believed clothing to reflect a person’s soul. The wax drawings embrace this idea, taking on a spectral quality that evokes the uncanny sense of absent presence that is felt when examining a person’s clothes. The white marks you can see are made by nothing more than the pressure of touching the surface with a sewing needle, recalling the domestic activity that would have taken place within this building, Ruskin’s beloved home. Like breath, or memory, the drawings have a fragile existence and will literally melt away if exposed to heat."
A catalogue for teh exhibition with essays by Ingrid Mida and Anuradha Chatterjee is also available. A PDF version can be seen here>>
‘Ruskin’s Good Looking!’ will be on display in the Blue Gallery at Brantwood, open every day Wed-Sun 10.30am – 4.00pm and daily from 18 March 2019 10.30am-5.00pm. Admission is included in the house ticket. For further information please contact Brantwood, Coniston, LA21 8AD, Cumbria. T: 015394 41396. www.brantwood.org.uk