Interview

Art

Attention

Culture

S&U interviews

6 February 2025

5 min read

Interview: Alastair Gordon on the artist’s attention

Why the overlooked and everyday capture the creative gaze.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

An artist sits in front of a board covered in images, canvases and paper.

The careers of artists rarely progress in a simple linear fashion. That was very much the experience of Alastair Gordon in 2024. Gordon is co-founder of Morphē Arts, a painter, art tutor at Leith School of Art and a contributor to Seen & Unseen. He works from his studio in South London and exhibits with galleries and art fairs across the UK, Europe and the US. His experience in the past year opens up fascinating avenues into guidance, focus and prayer.

He says that: “In many ways, I achieved none of the goals I set for myself last year. I didn’t generate more income in the studio than the previous year, I wasn’t invited to exhibit at the prominent LA gallery I had in my sights, and I didn’t make it into Modern Painters magazine.

Yet, I had an extraordinary year exhibiting that excelled my expectations. Exhibiting at An Lanntair Gallery in the Outer Hebrides marked my first museum show. I completed my first public commission for a church in South London, and my fourth book, Lost Things, co-written with the wonderful poet Ed Mayhew, is ready for release next month.

This past year taught me a valuable lesson about not fixating on goals as defined by the art world. Instead, I learned to focus more on what truly matters: the work that really matters and the people I hope to connect with through my painting.”

One of the surprising opportunities that came to him in 2024 was a commission to paint for a church. He says of this that: “It was a wonderful opportunity to create a painting for All Saints, Wandsworth. It’s unusual to have the chance to make a large work that resonates so deeply with my Christian faith. The painting is centred around the theme of prayer, and I aimed to draw on art historical references to prayer while incorporating the prayers of the current church congregation.

When I was working on the imagery for 'Prayer of the Saints,' I focused on key ideas related to the prayers of the church congregation—past, present, and future. Commissioned to complete the nine vacant panels in the chancel, I faced a unique compositional challenge.

The motifs of olive leaves, lilies, white roses, pebbles, and feathers symbolise quiet petitions to God. The central panel features an open Bible to Philippians 4:6, accompanied by a handwritten journal with a sketch of a stained-glass window and a prayer of Augustine, as well as a broken mobile phone that represents a longing to communicate.

I included images of Wandsworth, Wimbledon, and Battersea to reflect our prayers for the local community, alongside portraits of current missionaries and a world map highlighting our prayers for God’s mission abroad. A portrait of a cherished brother who died young serves as a poignant reminder of our prayers for lament and hope.”

As a result, he says: “The painting features flowers like white roses and lilies, which are often observed in Western art as symbols of prayer, alongside images of the local community, held in reverence by the congregation and the missionaries they support worldwide.”

The philosopher Simone Weil suggested that attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same as prayer. Gordon says that this insight on attention and prayer resonates deeply with his experience as an artist: “When I engage fully in my work, that heightened attention feels like a form of prayer.”

An altar is surrounded behind by a curved wall displaying art work on panels. — Prayer of the Saints, Wandsworth

Looking at the overlooked is central to my artistic practice. I feel a resonance with artists of the past who have focused on the everyday moments.

His latest book project, a collaboration with Ed Mayhew, touches on similar themes: “It started with a glimmer. Two years ago, Ed sent me a poem and asked if I would like to create a painting in response. It was the most beautiful poem and an enticing invitation. I made a painting and sent it back to him. He replied with another poem, and I responded with another painting. This back-and-forth continued, and before we knew it, we had created 25 poems and paintings in collaboration.

The connection between words and images was foremost in our thinking for this project. I didn’t want to illustrate so much as to respond to Ed’s words through paint and drawing. Similarly, when Ed returned my paintings with words, he aimed not so much to describe but also to converse. Our hope was to create an equal exchange between word and image, allowing each to complement and enhance the other.

Lost Things is a precious collaboration. We are very grateful for this partnership and the unique book it has produced. Lost Things explores all the things that go missing in life, the hopes we have for their return, and the love we share for the overlooked. This book explores the oddities that have been misplaced or forgotten—strange objects that wash up on the shore, appear in your sock drawer, or disappear into the loft for decades. It also reflects on the people we have lost or forgotten. In this way, the book takes a playful approach while also pointing toward deeper truths.

Paying attention in this way to what others have overlooked or lost seems very much the task of artists: “Looking at the overlooked is central to my artistic practice. I feel a resonance with artists of the past who have focused on the everyday moments that might otherwise go unobserved. Most often, it’s the mundane objects that have become so familiar that they almost become invisible.

Focusing on details—colours, shapes, emotions, and often overlooked objects—allows me to connect with something greater. It feels like speaking in tongues; the act of creation transcends words and expresses something less tangible. At times, the meaning isn’t clear, and I need to wait for it to be revealed.”

All this would seem to have been very much the case in the past year, where unanticipated opportunities led to wonderful work and exciting new projects.

Visit Alastair's site

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Article

Culture

Economics

Ethics

1 May 2025

6 min read

The rights and wrongs of making money with meme coins

When does investing become speculating, or even addictive gambling?

Laurence Fletcher

Laurence is a journalist at the Financial Times.

A montage shows Trump with a raised fist against other images of him and the phrase 'fight fight fight'.

$Trump coin marketing image.

gettrumpmemes.com,

Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs may have driven sharp swings in global financial markets, but his actions in markets a few months earlier were in some ways even more peculiar.

On the Friday before his inauguration as the 47th US President in January, the Republican surprised many with the launch of the $TRUMP memecoin, described by its website as “the only official Trump meme”. The cryptocurrency token, in which Trump’s family business owned a stake, initially soared in value to more than $14bn over that following weekend.

Then, on the Sunday, Trump’s wife Melania launched her own memecoin, $MELANIA, which reached a value of $8.5bn. Even the pastor who spoke at the president’s inauguration subsequently launched his own memecoin.

For those wondering what exactly a memecoin is, you are not alone. In short, they are a form of cryptocurrency - an asset class that itself has attracted plenty of questions about its substance and purpose - representing online viral moments. They have no fundamental value or business model and, according to the US securities regulator, “typically have limited or no use or functionality”.

Donald and Melania Trump’s coins subsequently plunged in price, but still have a value of around $2.5bn and $214mn respectively, according to website CoinMarketCap.

There are plenty of others in existence. PEPE, based on a comic frog, has a value of around $3.6bn; BONK, a cartoon dog, has a market cap of $1.5bn; and PNUT, a reference to a squirrel euthanised by authorities in New York and about which Trump was allegedly “fired up” (although doubt has since been cast on the president’s involvement in the matter), is still valued at around $174mn, despite having fallen sharply in price.

Dogecoin, seen as the world’s first memecoin and originally created as a joke, boasts a market value of around $25bn. (There are other memecoins which may not be suitable for these pages).

Some people’s willingness to buy an “asset” with no use or fundamental value may seem strange to more traditional investors. But it can be viewed as just one manifestation of the speculative investor behaviour evident since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and, indeed, at times throughout history.

The price of Bitcoin recently rose above $100,000, despite many investors still viewing it as having little or no value (in 2023 the UK’s Treasury select committee described cryptocurrencies as having “no intrinsic value, huge price volatility and no discernible social good”). In early 2021, shares in GameStop - a loss-making US video games retailer that some hedge funds were betting against - rocketed as much as 2,400 per cent, as retail investors piled in, many with the aim of inflicting pain on the hedge fund short sellers (in that respect at least, a highly successful strategy that became the subject of the film Dumb Money). The huge rise in AI and other tech stocks in recent years - until the recent tariff-driven volatility - has also been described as a bubble by some commentators.

Whether or not such episodes can be compared to infamous bouts of speculative mania in history depends on your point of view (and often can only be judged with the benefit of hindsight) - be it the 17th century Dutch tulip bulb mania, shares in the South Sea Company in the 18th century or the dotcom boom and bust of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

But it does give rise to the question of when investment should start to be described as speculation or even as gambling? And what are the rights and wrongs of any of those activities?

There can be negative effects, for instance if the actions of speculators force businesses in the real economy to change their plans or divert time and resources...

Gambling can be thought of as risking a stake on, for instance, the result of a game of chance or sport in the hope of a bigger payout. While often the result is purely down to chance, in some cases a strategy or an element of research (for instance of a horse or football team’s form) can be used. Investment, in contrast, tends to involve purported economic utility and assets believed to have some sort of underlying value, and holds the hope of future profit (although there are also plenty of bad investments or those that have gone to zero). While an investor must be prepared to lose their entire stake, in some cases such an event is relatively unlikely (for instance, if they buy a fund tracking the performance of a major stock exchange). Speculation is harder to define, but is generally seen as shorter term than investment, with more chance of a bigger gain or loss, and dependent on price fluctuations. Rightly or wrongly, the term has a more negative connotation than investment.

One writer who explored the ethics of these activities was Oswald von Nell-Breuning, a Jesuit theologian and economist who served as an adviser to the Pope and who was banned from publishing under the Nazis.

While he found that “one general definition cannot capture all the nuances” of speculation, he identified two different types of speculative activity - one that was purely trying to make a profit from financial market trading, and one based on trying to create a viable business. (See this article in the Catholic Social Science Review for a fuller explanation of Nell-Breuning’s views on speculation).

As the CSSR article shows, Nell-Breuning found that there can be positive effects from speculation - one might think of better liquidity and price discovery in a market, while, in commodity futures markets, speculators allow producers to hedge risk.

But he also argued that there can be negative effects, for instance if the actions of speculators force businesses in the real economy to change their plans or divert time and resources away from production.

And whereas gambling typically takes place within a circle of players who have chosen to take part, speculation, he wrote, can affect a greater portion of society - for instance, if it affects the price of shares or bonds they hold.

The Bible - on which Nell-Breuning’s faith and analysis was based - does not take a prescriptive approach to such activities. But it does provide some interesting guidance.

An entrepreneurial approach to business and investment is applauded, for instance when the writer of the book of Proverbs (traditionally believed to be King Solomon) praises the virtues of “an excellent wife”. These include investing in a field and using her earnings from business to plant a vineyard, and feeding her family from her gains.

Jesus tells a story of a master who, before going on a journey, gives his property to his servants, each according to their ability. To one he gives five “talents” (a large unit of money), to a second two and to a third servant he gives one.

The first servant trades with his talents and makes five more talents - a 100 per cent profit - and is applauded by the master on his return. The second servant also trades and similarly makes two more talents and is again applauded.

But the third servant, being afraid and believing the master to be “a hard man”, hides the money in a hole in the ground. He is condemned as “wicked and slothful”, and told that he should at least have put the money in the bank.

While Jesus’s story may primarily be about how we view God’s nature, how we use our God-given abilities and whether or not we can take risks in faith for Him, it is also hard not to see investment and indeed wise speculation as being virtuous activities here. Putting the money into a bank account is, in this story anyway, more of a fallback option.

But the Bible also warns us against putting money above all else in our lives. The love of money is, famously, a root of all sorts of evil, while we are also told to be content with what we have, and that “wealth gained hastily will dwindle”.

Nell-Breuning similarly warns that a “get-rich-quick” mindset, when this is placed above all else, can be harmful, and advises caution in situations where the lure of big profits can lead the speculator into market manipulation or fraud.

After all, both gambling and crypto trading have the potential to become dangerous and damaging addictions needing treatment.

Ultimately, Nell-Breuning struggled to come to a simple conclusion on the question of whether speculation, in and of itself, is morally wrong. It is, he wrote, a judgment call for those involved.

When making such decisions ourselves, his - and the Bible’s - warnings may be worth bearing in mind.