Animals ‘in the Fraternity of universal Nature’

The Romantics took great interest in science, the natural world and animals. In his utopian community the Pantisocracy (the all-governing society – where labour would be minimised and time devoted to study, liberal discussions and educating children) Samuel Taylor Coleridge said animals were to be brothers and sisters ‘in the Fraternity of universal Nature’. His poem ‘To a Young Ass’ hailed the animal he had befriended in Jesus College as ‘Brother’. Though mocked at the time for these views, animal rights and animal welfare were debated widely amongst the Romantics and remain controversial issues today, as Andrew Kelly reveals.

Photo credit: Nick Smith

Andrew Kelly 26 March 2015

Who Gets What - And Why: The Hidden World of Matchmaking and Market Design
In many parts of life – jobs, housing, medical care, education, even a date on the internet – price is not the only determinant of who gets what. So how do the other processes that influence who gets which goods, jobs, university places and partners really work? In Who Gets What, Nobel Prize-winning economist Alvin Roth uncovers the global rules of how markets allocate, how matchmaking shapes lives, where markets exist that we may not even realise, and how everything about our biggest experiences – from getting accepted at university or living where we want – can be better understood and negotiated when one understands the design of those matching markets. The distribution of rewards is often unfair, but it’s seldom as random as it seems. Roth reveals just how much of our life takes place in marketplaces, and leads us to a new understanding of who gets what and why. He sheds new light on the politics of free markets and how many things that we choose in life also must choose us.

Alvin Roth 13 July 2015

RICHARD LONG - 'IN CONVERSATION'
Tuesday 20 October 2015

Richard Long has been in the vanguard of Conceptual, Minimal and Land art in Britain since he created A Line Made by Walking in 1967, while still a student. A photograph of the path left by his feet in the grass, a fixed line of movement, established a precedent that art could be a journey. Through this medium of walking, time, space and distance became new subjects for his art. From that time he expanded his walks to wilderness regions all over the world. He mediates his experience of these places, from mountains through to deserts, shorelines, grasslands, rivers and snowscapes, according to archetypal geometric marks and shapes, made by his footsteps alone or gathered from the materials of the place. These walks and temporary works, where measurements of time and distance, place names and phenomena are vocabulary for both original ideas and powerful, condensed narratives.

Richard Long was born in Bristol, UK in 1945, where he continues to live and work. He studied at West of England College of Art, Bristol (1962-65), then St Martin’s School of Art, London (1966-68). In 1969, Long was included in a seminal exhibition of Minimalist and Conceptual works entitled, When Attitude Becomes Form, at the Kunsthalle, Bern, for which he made A Walk in the Alps that was documented by this first text work. After 1969, Long began making journeys and sculptures in wilderness places all around the world, documenting his walks with photographs, maps and text works. In the 1980s Long began making new types of mud works using handprint applied directly to the wall. He also continued to make large sculptures of lines and circles from slate, driftwood, footprints or stone often sourced from quarries near the exhibition sites.

Richard Long 'in conversation'

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Richard Long 'in conversation'

University of Bristol

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