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.
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.
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!
Tuesday 21 October 2014
autumn leaves
Sitting in Sheffield Botanical Gardens on Sunday. Felt overwhelmingly happy surrounded by the intense yellow of crisp fallen leaves with sunlight sprinkling across as they fluttered gently with the wind.
Ordinary Beauty - the photography of Edwin Smith - RIBA
I hadn't heard of Edwin Smith before and I think I really should have. His photographs are beautiful with amazing light and show the beauty of everyday life.
On till 6 Dec 2014
Monday 13 October 2014
Ancient Lives, New Discoveries - British Museum
Fascinating look under the wrappings of Egyptian mummies. They put mummies through scanners and you can see the amulets and things wrapped in there as well as into those jars of hearts/lungs etc. You can see what the people looked like too. At the end you see their ghostly faces recreated. It's macabre and yet it conjures up real lives from the coffins.
On till 19 April 2015
Sunday 14 September 2014
Sunday 7 September 2014
Matisse: Cut Outs - Tate Modern
This was open all night last night because it is the last weekend/popularity so I went at 6am. It was glorious. Space to look at leisure and just wonderful.
The colours and the energy and the joy in the cut outs made me so happy.
Making Colour - National Gallery
I hadn't thought about how paint colours were made...very interesting to see how pigments were developed, illustrated by paintings and their use of colour. Favourite bit was history of blue. Historically, ground lapis lazuli was the best way to get blue!
Sunday 31 August 2014
Baskerville's Tea Room - Palmers Green
I used to live in Palmers Green and it's always nice to go visit - especially when I find plenty of books I want in the very excellent and plentiful charity shops there AND discover a large tea room has opened and it is very pretty and has a garden and a huge tea selection (I had a refreshing green tea with ginger and lemongrass) and banana cake with peanut butter frosting. Banana cake is my favourite and I love peanut butter. Yesssss.
Friday 15 August 2014
Monday 11 August 2014
Spectra - Ryoji Ikeda - Victoria Tower Gardens
Just caught this on the last night and was well worth hanging about to experience. Bright jets of light straight up in the sky in the middle of London and hypnotic sounds as you move amongst the pillars of light in memory of the first world war. Dust sparkled as it passed through the beams. Beautiful.
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