Angela Bensted | Public figure
Angela Bensted
Reviews
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25.01.2022 Anyone who’s ever helped organise a sporting event knows how challenging it can be. Do we have Blu Tack to post results sheets? Is the BBQ gas bottle full? Will the first aid officer remember to roll up after their night shift at the hospital? On the twentieth anniversary of the Sydney Olympic Games, my thoughts turned to the organisers from the sport I’m deeply involved with, fencing. Having now spent a few years behind the scenes at national events, I wondered how they managed to pull off an Olympic-standard tournament all those years ago. So I called them to ask. Here’s their story.
23.01.2022 Sharing my day and the contents of my shopping cart
21.01.2022 Language warrior or cantankerous writer with too many wines on board? You decide.
21.01.2022 Be inspired by Isaac Newton’s persistence as much as his genius.
18.01.2022 A short story #prompted by the opening line of Franz Kafka's novel Metamorphosis and influenced by a recent visitor to my home.
16.01.2022 What time do you eat dinner? Or do you call it tea? This article by Lauren Collins in The New Yorker has given me a whole new strategy for moving from small talk to deep debate at the next party I go to (whenever that may be). "Ask about dinnertime and you’ll end up hearing all about a person’s upbringing and their current family situation, their workload and their waistline, the intimate dynamics of their life."
16.01.2022 If a day on a boat is an option for you right now, I highly recommend it. Here’s how a spot of whale watching lifted my spirits.
16.01.2022 Love these images. I’m inspired. (Although there’s no chance I’ll be running laps of my living room any time soon.)
14.01.2022 Are jigsaw puzzles having a resurgence or did they never really go away? Artist Tim Klein has taken the obsession one step further, combining pieces from different puzzles to reinvent them as a montage. "A typical jigsaw puzzle manufacturer uses the same die-cut pattern for many different puzzles," Tim says on his website. "This makes the pieces interchangeable, so I sometimes find that I can combine portions from two or more puzzles to make a surreal 'puzzle montage' that the manufacturer never imagined."
12.01.2022 More stories from the trenches. Having admired, in a previous post, the work ethic of Isaac Newton during his bubonic plague isolation period, I now offer a picture more akin to my own experience.
10.01.2022 For all my fellow fencing tragics. Love it or hate it, we owe this movie a shout-out for inspiring so many people to pick up a weapon and take to the piste. I wonder if the game will have the same impact?
10.01.2022 Painting with numbers. Anthropologist Wade Davis relies on some striking statistics to show why a pandemic might be the final straw for America, a nation he argues was already in decline before Corona came knocking. For example, he writes On D-Day, June 6th, 1944, the Allied death toll was 4,414; in 2019, domestic gun violence had killed that many American men and women by the end of April. Davis’ essay is a great read. It’s a long one though. Pop the kettle on first.
06.01.2022 I’ve been looking for inspiration to guide my enthusiastic but aimless photography efforts. This selection from Max Dupain’s work is a good place to start. The geometry, perspective and light and shade are all ringing my bells. Maybe it’s time to muck about with B&W on my Insta.
03.01.2022 I published this story to my website last night, only to discover my website was broken. The website is fixed now, following a midnight email to my tech team. I add this morsel to the narrative because it serves as the final chapter, the perfect epilogue to the story itself. Read on and you will understand why.
02.01.2022 Perspective is a marvellous thing. Hoping your life holds glimmers of joy and the sun shines bright on your horizon.
01.01.2022 It’s not exactly the same, the gallery. It’s no longer somewhere I can simply drop in, on a whim, to escape the daily grind. Now there are timed, ticketed gateways. Areas are cordoned off with black tape and doorways are no longer dual purpose, now designated entrances or exits. Some bathrooms are closed. But this is a small price to pay for access to the collections. I’ll happily schedule a visit to soak in colour and shape and texture, to get lost in the giant canvases of M...avis Ngallametta and crane my neck at Ai Weiwei’s tinkling boomerang. The coffee tastes better after a few months away. I think the water dragons missed me. The staff certainly did. The morning I burst through the gallery doors, phone held aloft with my e-ticket, staff outnumbered visitors by at least two to one. And all of them smiled and said hello and bounced around with undisguised joy. Much like myself. #QAGOMA
01.01.2022 A great sentence (love how it takes the reader in one direction before an unexpected u-turn) and a sentiment worth sharing. Love it.
