EDITOR’S LETTER
Natural instinct
elcome to our November issue – our annual art special – which is dedicated to natural splendour. It is an enormous honour to welcome French conceptual artist Sophie Calle, who graces our limited-edition subscribers cover with a self-portrait of her camouflaged as a tree. The image is part of Sophie’s new project, (On the Hunt), which we are proud to present in an exclusive, Sophie was drawn to its lonely hearts ads and soon discovered parallels between the hunt for game and the matrimonial chase. And so she went through 125 years of matrimonial ads, grouping them by decade and theme (my favourite being ‘1930-1940: Hard worker, mildly modern’), and juxtaposing them with her photographs of hunting watchtowers, symbolising predators, and highway surveillance images of animals at night, symbolising prey. Far from glorifying a contested sport, Sophie seems to suggest that, for all the trappings of civilisation, we’ve more in common with the natural world than we often recognise.
