Thursday 25 December 2014

Wednesday 24 December 2014

Festival of Light at Longleat

Utterly beautiful and gloriously festive and fun. Even the light up singing Christmas tree was magical and I was expecting to find it ridiculous. It was over the top wonderful and fantastic. Thank you Longleat folks and thank you to my parents for taking me.

Mirrorcity - Hayward Gallery

Interesting but I was perhaps not in the mood for art that takes itself very seriously and takes lots of thinking to make sense of which I was too tired to do. Much of it was video art with sad monotone  poetic narration. Tim Etchell's work is interesting and text based, playing with perception/reality/humour - one piece was a row of framed description of a city each gradually changing with text in different colours and painting very different stories of a place. And I really liked Emma McNally's work (pictured) beautiful grey drawings in delicate lines of dots that conjure up maps or music that don't really exist.


Wangechi Mutu - Victoria Miro Gallery

Fantastical collages of mythical women in crazy seas.

Sunday 23 November 2014

Yoshitomo Nara: greetings from a place in my heart - Dairy Art Centre






beautiful colours. sinister children.

dairy art centre is a really nice space too and didn't mind photo taking!

lots to see - big paintings, little drawings, sculptures. loved the handwritten timeline along the bottom of the wall in the room of drawings. loved the 'reflected' colours in the eyes of the paintings.



blood swept lands and seas of red










Sunday 2 November 2014

Stranger that Fiction - Joan Fontcuberta - Science Museum





Ok. Favourite exhibition of the year. I LOVE this! Never heard of him before but YES. If I had time (there's not long left before this show ends) I would go again.

Fontcuberta creates stories with photography and plays with the trust we put into photographs and the things we see in a museum setting. (And it works - Stu got really confused at first thinking it seemed so real but couldn't be real but was it real?)

My favourite bit is the Fauna part at the beginning which shows the research of a fictional professor who was researching unusual animals and there are photographs and taxidermy and sound recordings and observations of wonderful animals. I particularly like what I call the Turtfluff. It has a turtle-y head and a fluffy body and when threatened it puts its fluffy tail in the air and it's head in the ground and pretends to be a bush.

Other animals included a clamshell with an arm, a baboon-centaur, a winged deer, a mousething with a snake for a tail, a unicorn winged monkey, a tortoise bird, a snake with legs.....I loved it and it was so convincing.

Other bodys of work showed fossilized mermaids, constellations that were really windscreen bugs, landscapes created by computers reading famous paintings, made up plants and miracles.

It's only on till 9 Nov - quick, quick go now!