The Penitent Review is Dr. Crystal Bennes and Tom Jeffreys. Together, and sometimes separately, we converse on art, artists and, occasionally, the art world.
The Penitent Review’s name is inspired as much by pentimenti as penitence. We reserve the right to change our minds and only maybe to feel remorseful about it.
To contact Tom and Crysal please drop us an email.
Tom Jeffreys is an independent writer and editor predominantly covering contemporary art and culture. He is particularly interested in work that engages with ecological concerns. His work has been published in magazines, newspapers and websites like art-agenda, ArtReview, Apollo, Frieze, The Guardian, The Independent, Monocle, New Scientist and The World of Interiors. In addition, he frequently contributes essays and other texts to exhibition publications for museums and galleries including: Cample Line, The Common Guild, Karsten Schubert, Sir John Soane’s Museum, Talbot Rice Gallery and University College London. He is the author of two books: The White Birch: a Russian Reflection (Little, Brown, 2021) and Signal Failure: London to Birmingham, HS2 on foot (Influx Press, 2017). Tom is represented by Zoe Ross at United Agents.
Dr Crystal Bennes is an artist, research, writer and educator based in Scotland. Her practice is grounded in long-term projects which foreground archival research, durational fieldwork and material experimentation. Recent bodies of work include an ongoing photographic exploration of an artificial island in Sweden created entirely out of radioactive waste from industrially-produced synthetic fertiliser and the experimental recreation of a nineteenth-century hay meadow based on a myth of unintentional plant migration from Italy to Denmark. Klara and the Bomb, her first photobook—charting connecting threads between the U.S.’s nuclear weapons research, women programmers, the invention of modern computers, and nuclear colonialism—was published by The Eriskay Connection in 2022. She recently completed an AHRC-funded practice-based PhD in fine art at Northumbria University researching the histories and uses of gendered representations of nature in the sciences, and exploring feminist critiques of physics. Between 2022 – 2024 she is resident at Talbot Rice Gallery as part of a Freelands Foundation programme.
