Theo Honohan

@theohonohan.bsky.social

578 Followers 460 Following

"The subtlest and most pervasive of all influences are those which create and maintain the repertory of stereotypes."

Knossos. Black-and-white photo by Lucien Hervé.
Tweet posted yesterday by Eric07 (@kevindyer6969): "They blowing up the sinter plant.. worker there from 93-96.. fecking horrible stuff.."
Emma Moore: We also discussed the image you wanted to produce, one that could not easily circulate or be manipulated online. As you mentioned earlier, the work could only be presented within a very controlled environment. Could you say more about why you chose to shoot the film on 35mm? Luke Willis Thompson: I think the primary reason had to do with a connection between Diamond’s video, made in a moment of trauma, and the physicality of analogue film. In both instances, what is recorded becomes the only possible image. It never felt like I had the right to take a digital HD camera and record endless amounts of footage, as it always felt like a privilege to create Diamond’s portrait. There’s a depth and brilliance to the medium of 35mm film that can evoke an emotional response, even in its most abstracted capturing of shadow and light. It would be easy to say it is the contrast of Diamond’s video, because it differs so dramatically in terms of pacing, resolution, and picture clarity, not to mention film grain versus pixilation. But mostly, in order to show up the consequence of Diamond’s video I wanted to work in cinema’s most canonical form; its high court.
We can, in fact, assert that without an appreciation of Carnot's dictum the history of the heat-engine must be unintelligible. The tremendous expansion [about 1,800-fold on vaporisation], or the great increase in pressure, which follows the conversion of water into steam meant quite simply that here was a working substance which could generate a usable amount of power without, at the same time, making unreasonable demands on the skills of engineers and metallurgists. The fact that, between the times of Newcomen and Woolf, the process was thermodynamically ‘inefficient’ was unimportant, indeed meaningless, for there was no yardstick, economic or scientific, against which its economy could be measured. After Carnot's analysis the virtue of steam as a working substance – the easy generation of high and therefore immediately usable pressures – was seen to be a drawback in that it made it much more difficult to exploit the full temperature range available. Everything that has happened since 1824 has confirmed Carnot's judgement, and we must therefore divide the history of the heat-engine into two very distinct periods: before and after Carnot.
My feet, prone to be cold on modern, air-conditioned trains, are nice and warm, thanks to hot air emerging from a mysterious (to me) silvery duct next to my left boot. At Loughborough Central Station I alight from the train alongside the guard, who's about seventeen, and his vintage BR uniform, possibly bought last year at the swapmeet I've just attended, is too big for him. I decide to probe the mystery of the silver duct, reasoning that this will be a win-win. I’ll increase my railway knowledge – and I do always feel I ought to be learning things on the preserved lines, perhaps to atone for the sheer pleasure I get from simply sitting on old trains – and the kid will presumably be pleased to enlighten me. ‘How is the heat generated?’ I ask. ‘It's not steam heat, is it?' ‘Oh, it's electric heating, I think,’ he says, and he heads off to the buffet, but he's checked by the driver of the DMU, who has stepped onto the platform. The drivers on preserved lines tend to be in their sixties or seventies – seventy-five is the cut off – but this driver is a long-haired, scruffy-yet-capable-looking bloke perhaps in his forties. ‘A word,’ he says beckoning the kid. ‘These trains are not electrically heated.’ He then gives the kid a short lecture about how ‘red diesel’ is atomised in a cylinder, the resulting hot air being pushed by a fan into the heating ducts. The lecture concluded, the boy hurries off, slightly embarrassed. I feel a bit guilty: the boy’s a volunteer, so it’s not as if he'd failed to do his job, but the preserved lines are two things: tourist attractions and living museums, and some of the volunteers are more curatorial than others. At least, I assume the driver’s a volunteer, but some of the preserved railways do employ drivers, and so perhaps professional pride had prompted this one to correct the kid.
The producing of Cold, is a thing very worthy the Inquisition, both for use and disclosure of causes. For Heat and Cold are Nature's two hands, whereby she chiefly worketh; and Heat we have in readiness, in respect of the fire: But for Cold, we must stay till it cometh, or seek it in deep Caves, or high Mountains; and when all is done, we cannot obtain it in any great degree: For Furnaces of Fire are far hotter than a Summer's Sun, but Vaults or Hills are not much colder than a Winter's Frost.
Three children are seen climbing a modular patterned screen around the door in the lobby of a modernist building. Black-and-white photo.
Architectural plans of the keep at Castle Rising.
"One afternoon in the autumn of 1851 a solitary horseman, followed by a pack-mule, was pushing through an arid stretch of country somewhere in central New Mexico. He had lost his way, and was trying to get back to the trail, with only his compass and his sense of direction for guides. The difficulty was that the country in which he found himself was so featureless— or rather, that it was crowded with features, all exactly alike. As far as he could see, on every side, the landscape was heaped up into monotonous red sand-hills, not much larger than haycocks, and very much the shape of haycocks. One could not have believed that in the number of square miles a man is able to sweep with the eye there could be so many uniform red hills. He had been riding among them since early morning, and the look of the country had no more changed than if he had stood still. He must have travelled through thirty miles of these conical red hills, winding his way in the narrow cracks between them, and he had begun to think that he would never see anything else. They were so exactly like one another that he seemed to be wandering in some geometrical nightmare; flattened cones, they were, more the shape of Mexican ovens than haycocks— yes, exactly the shape of Mexican ovens, red as brick-dust, and naked of vegetation except for small juniper trees. And the junipers, too, were the shape of Mexican ovens. Every conical hill was spotted with smaller cones of juniper, a uniform yellowish green, as the hills were a uniform red. The hills thrust out of the ground so thickly that they seemed to be pushing each other, elbowing each other aside, tipping each other over. The blunted pyramid, repeated so many hundred times upon his retina and crowding down upon him in the heat, had confused the traveller, who was sensitive to the shape of things."
"i8 Gallery is pleased to present Roni Horn: Mother, Wonder, a solo exhibition of new work by Roni Horn, on view from 22 May until 12 July 2025. The show, Horn's sixth solo presentation at i8 Gallery, debuts a photographic series of Landbrot, an area in southern Iceland known for its mossy, undulating landscape. Featuring portraits of pseudocraters, a volcanic form created as lava flows through wetlands, Horn's photographic compositions couple the rolling hills, emphasising an anthropomorphisation of the terrain. The acts of pairing and doubling, often used by Horn in her work, invite deeper consideration from the viewer and underscore the surreality and indeterminacy of the hills."
Pale, detailed painting of a small conservatory or greenhouse.
Bell-shaped katōmado windows.
Traditionally the UK weather station with the largest diurnal differences is Altnaharra in the Scottish Highlands. On December 30, 1995, Altnaharra recorded a temperature swing of 29.3C. On that occasion it started from a low base, having just registered a joint UK record low of -27.2C
Clouds over a house.
Detail of clay sculpture showing tunnel breakthrough.
Another sharp-focus photograph of a forest, with grey, brown and black signs of burnt undergrowth. It's a little brighter.
Sharp-focus photograph of a forest, with brown and black signs of burnt undergrowth. The light has a soft Golden Hour quality.
Three.js visualisation of shadow border inside a semicircular niche.
Surrealist photo collage
Spread of book with ship illustrations.
Cover of Danh Vo's book "Slip of the Tongue". It's a grid of calligraphic capital letters (technically, majuscule Old English or blackletter or something).
Drawing in black on white paper: a grid of outline blackletter capitals, in the pattern MOTH ERTO NGUE
What reference model did you take? The hotel lobby, of certain hotels... because I feel very bad about airports like Munich or Vienna, like those things Foster does, full of welded tubes, of crystals, because I don't see the need to insist on technological metaphors that don't calm anyone, while an airport that was all like a Stube with a glass of beer or a goulash... well, I would understand it better. In the end, I wish airports didn't exist at all, I mean as an institutional type, I would like to be able to take the plane like the bus, I know it's difficult but I can try... excuse me a moment ... (...)
'When you talk about "doing your own thing" what do you think about? There are the small projects that are more private but not minor. I do exhibitions, the usual furniture, glassware, objects, my own drawings, and now I've also become a photographer, which is what I've always done, but now someone has decided that I'm not just an architect and designer but a real photographer, and they call me, ask me to do exhibitions and books... It's a bit of a frenetic activity, almost an obsession, because, you know, in the end even doing a book is a communication project where you have to decide a lot of things... then there's "TERRAZZO", which Barbara (Radice) does, where we decided to [wind up] as a magazine but how to continue as a publishing house with a series of... "subtle" books, a bit chic, a bit snobbish.'
Plate from McGoodwin's book Architectural Shades and Shadows (1904) showing shadows in a circular niche.
A wooden model of an intersecting sphere and cone.
"Until the Railway Grouping of 1923, there were about 120 railway companies in the United Kingdom, a relatively sensible number compared to 1846, when there'd been 272. The multiplicity of companies caused confusion both by their separateness and by their entanglement. A 'Correspondent' wrote to the Railway Magazine of October 1906 to say that he'd seen, near Basingstoke on the London & South Western Railway main line, a train drawn by an LSWR engine and consisting of, as he put it: 1. South Western Railway's carriage 2. North Eastern Railway's horse box 3. Great Northern Railway's carriage 4. Great Eastern Railway's horse box 5. Great Western Railway's horse box 6. Great Central Railway's carriage He added, 'I should think it is quite an unusual thing for six different railways to be represented in a train of only six vehicles, and I thought it would interest Railway Magazine readers.'"
Figure from Lawrence, Snezana, "Descriptive Geometry in England — a Historical Sketch". On the left, a figure from Monge's original book on Géometrie Descriptive; on the right, a figure from Nicholson's Parallel Oblique Projection, which looks a little more basic, though clearly involving the key idea of projectively related orthographic projections (i.e. corresponding points on distinct projections linked with parallel lines).
Pencil drawing on paper, showing a night scene with bonfires in the foreground. A small group of people is visible standing around the fires. In the background there are several low buildings.
Cover of a recent book titled "Applications of Descriptive Geometry in Botanical Art". The illustration shows a construction of the shadow cast by one perfectly spherical orange onto anotehr larger perfectly spherical orange: there's an orthographic view from the Sun, and one on each of the horizontal and vertical planes as well as an auxiliary plane. Precise but not easily applicable to irregular objects.
Architectural plans with black poché on a white background.
Photo from linked webpage of the ship in question, the Orca Fisher.
Image of a painting containing three different grey tones. It's abstract but resembles the perspectivally rendered patterned floor of a Piero della Francesca painting.
Black-and-white photograph of part of a striped church.
" In fact… I have to say that one of the things that struck me the most in Milan was the beauty, the physical beauty of the Milanese designers. I hadn’t thought of that. Yes, because… But I should add… People like Marco Zanuso, Vico Magistretti, Ettore Sottsass, were very snobby, very sophisticated. We’d never seen people like that in Florence. We had professors who were certainly good at their job, but they lacked the charisma that was typical of… and that was a cause of the very success of Italian design. In the post-war period, encountering individuals who were so sophisticated and elegant, so well-developed esthetically, was an occasion for seduction, nothing like the industrial side of Milan, which was very powerful, but also very limited. So these charismatic individuals had a great influence, as happens in the history of human relations. They had a great… It can’t be described in a book of history. CR: That’s why I didn’t read it. AB: However… encountering these professional designers who were so refined and well-developed, had a profound effect on us. It was fundamental, very important for us."
Wireframe orthographic drawing of half of a diagrid cylinder.
Print showing the lantern of St John's Point lighthouse. From https://thedesignerofthings.com/products/lh10s-st-johns?variant=42657060520171
Black-and-photo of an industrial landscape.
'... what art is for "Are you talking about for the artist or for the audience? I'm not sure that it would be the same thing. For myself, it's everything from provocation to education, enlightenment, survival, entertainment and pleasure. I've never thought that I would be good at anything else. I have a lot of space in my head, you can put me alone in a room for the next year, I venture, and I wouldn't have a problem with it. Because I'm always self-entertaining or self-engaging. And art is a wonderful answer for me in terms of leaving evidence of myself or being a witness. A lot about being an artist for me is being a witness."'
Typographic book cover for "Halluzination, Perspektive, Synthese" by Florian Hecker: each page number in various sections is listed in neat tabular rows and columns, from page 1 to page 175.
Colour photo showing a dramatic fjord with industrial construction site in the foreground.
Colour photo of a precise and realistic oil painting of deciduous trees in a flat grassy landscape.
From "Where the Wild Things Are": Max's bedroom is transforming into a forest
Colour photo from Los Angeles Magazine, August 2003 via Google Books
Combined axonometric and section drawing showing the windows and the bookshop below.
Colour photo: Elie Nadelman Woman at the Piano (c. 1917) Painted and stained wood 35 1/8 x 23 1/4 x 9" (89.2 x 59.1 x 22.9 cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Estate of Elie Nadelman It's a stylized wooden sculpture of a woman in a long brown dress playing an upright piano. Her hair seems to be done up under a bonnet and her neck and face (but not her hands) are painted white.
Photo of a churchyard with a "Meadow in progress" sign on the railing.
Photos of the riverbank by Michael J. Crosbie