“It’s 2026! God knows what fresh horrors and pleasures this year has in store for us all!” was how I opened Not London last month, and boy oh boy have the horrors been aplenty. Remember when I used to get to open this column with a cheeky comment on how London is shit?
January has certainly been bleak in the predictable dark-and-wet-and-cold way that happens every single year and yet always manages to take us by surprise. This year has felt undoubtedly bleaker.
But perhaps we can take our disgust and disappointment and use it to fuel our commitments to our communities and our rights to free expression. Spending your time and your money in a regional arts centre is a great way to do that. So, from Cornwall to Cardiff via two of the Yorkshires, here is my list of must-see exhibitions outside of London this February, with female artists and pioneering craftmakers in the spotlight.
Hopefully we will be able to resume with our usual schedule of shitting on London in the introduction soon. Fingers crossed.
Listen, I’m going to make a tenuous comparison here because I’m having caffeine withdrawal and I am *this close* to drinking some old Bovril at the back of the cupboard, which I’m sure my brain can be tricked into thinking it's caffeinated by the fact that it is both hot and brown. There is something oddly beautiful about the neon debris that glitches across old TV footage, and I was surprised to see similar, lurid sparks when I watched a video of someone looking at human ashes under a microscope. Someone less tired would now connect the two and write something astute about the fragmentation of our lives in the context of digitalisation. It would be incredibly deep. Fortunately, Paul Lemmon’s show, opening imminently at Coventry’s Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, uses corrupted YouTube footage as the source material for his large-scale oil paintings, which speak to the beautiful tension between our lives online and off. The dialogue between digital and analogue imagery in his work is incredibly satisfying and will be well worth the trip.
It has been well over 100 years since Birmingham was thought of as the “Workshop of the World” or the “City of a Thousand Trades”. Thanks to the systematic closure of British manufacturing, it can feel like the country laid down its tools a long time ago. But ‘Made in the Middle’ at the Midlands Arts Centre is here to prove that the region’s urge to create, and its craftspeople’s skill, has gone nowhere. The exhibition showcases contemporary crafts, from ceramics to metalwork, as well as textiles, jewellery and sculptures, made by 37 artists from the Midlands, aged between 22 and 82. It was curated by Craftspace, a Birmingham-based charity dedicated to the promotion of contemporary craft – a vital mission if you care about nice things ever being made again.
Bodmin, Cornwall - FLAMM - opening 28 February until 03 March
I want to go to FLAMM, but I can’t go, so I’m writing about it here will have to do. Please bear with me while I get “I didn’t go to FLAMM and all I got was this lousy article” t-shirts into production. FLAMM is a yearly contemporary arts festival in Cornwall, designed to showcase and celebrate the wealth of talented artists and craftspeople working in the South West. The region has been a haven for artists since the Victorian era, when (wealthy) creatives could use the newly-built trainlines to find out that Cornwall is significantly nicer than literally anywhere else in the country. The festival sets up shop in a different Cornish town each year, and now it’s Bodmin’s turn, with major installation commissions from five artists, heavy on ghost stories, automata, and jackdaws.
The nighttime urban scenes of Victorian cities for which John Atkinson Grimshaw is best known are beautiful. I’ll admit it’s a shame that I automatically think a murder is about to happen in them at any moment, because that’s basically all that happens at night in Victorian cities in television shows. But aside from the impending sense of peril - they’re beautiful. Leeds Art Gallery has amassed a huge collection of ‘Nocturnes’ by their home-grown hero, and ‘Don’t Let’s Ask for the Moon’ brings them all together. Included in the display is the gallery’s latest Grimshaw acquisition, Reflections on the Aire – on strike, believed to be one of the first paintings depicting the fallout of industrial action. So let this exhibition also be a reminder to join a union. Sadly, there’s not a union for whatever this is that I’m calling a career.
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Watts Gallery, Surrey - Women of Influence: The Pattle Sisters - until 04 May
The Pattle Sisters had it all: they were hot, rich, and highly networked. May 2026 bring such blessings to us all! A lot of credit is given to artists for changing the course of culture, but artists would be nowhere without the wealthy patrons who enabled them to do their thing (conveniently, though, throughout history, most artists have also happened to be independently loaded). In Victorian England, there may have been none so influential as the seven (seven!?) Pattle Sisters. Included among them were a pioneering photographer (Julia), the grandmother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (Maria - ‘Mia’), and the salon hostess whose gatherings supported huge artistic, political, and scientific developments (Sara). That the exhibition celebrating the sisters is being held at Watts Gallery is wonderfully apt, due to Sara’s influence on the life of G.F. Watts.
Turner Contemporary, Kent - Bridget Riley: Learning to See - until 04 May
I want to enjoy Bridget Riley’s work more than I do, because I’m not sure that I totally *get* it (although I do hold her in the highest esteem as a pioneer), but I think a visit to ‘Learning to See’ at Turner Contemporary would sort me right out. Working closely with Riley herself - sorry, Bridget, I didn’t mean what I said earlier - the exhibition spans the entirety of her six-decade career, and showcases preparatory works on paper which have typically been left out of the spotlight. The backdrop of the Margate coastline also promises to be a nice link to Riley’s upbringing on the Cornish coast.
The Box, Devon - Beryl Cook: Pride and Joy - until 31 May
If I were going to be transformed into a figure in a painting - at random - but could choose the artist, I’d choose Beryl Cook. The odds would be very high with Cook that you’d end up as someone having the time of their life: on a girls’ night out, having a chippie tea, winning the bingo, drinking tea on the lawn in the buff. ‘Pride and Joy’ at The Box is the most extensive exhibition of Cook’s works to date, displaying more than 80 of her paintings that truly capture the joy of the everyday – even during times of major historic change. Cook’s biographies often highlight how she didn’t produce her first painting until her thirties, something regularly pointed out about ‘older’ artists to encourage aspiring creatives that “it’s never too late”. This is less and less reassuring to me as my own thirties loom ever closer. I saw a video the other day urging people that “25 is not too old” to start your dreams. Gulp.
National Museum Cardiff, Glamorgan - Gwen John: Strange Beauties - opening 07 February until 28 June
I love Gwen John because for years she was described as the “overlooked sister of her much more famous brother, Augustus John”, and now she is arguably the more celebrated sibling. You’ve got to play the long game. Celebrating her 150th birthday this year, there are several Gwen John exhibitions scheduled around the country (you only turn 150 once!) but the place to see her work, surely, is in her native Wales. Amgueddfa Cymru is bringing together rarely-seen works by John from its collections, along with major loans, to celebrate the birthday girl in the first major collection of her work in the country in more than four decades.
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridgeshire - War Craft - until 23 August
The last thing we want to think about right now is war. Even “craft” makes some people nervous. But perhaps these uncertain times are the perfect moment to visit the Fitzwilliam Museum’s new display of prints, engraved coins, and personal items, showcasing the beauty that has come out of conflicts over the centuries and across continents. Sharing stories of soldiers, civilians, and POWs, the museum displays these objects not to remind us of an inherent human will to violence, but to create. Rutger Bregman’s ‘Humankind’ might be a good read ahead of your visit to the Fitzwilliam, to help remind you that humans aren’t hardwired to be terrible bastards, and that moments of real tenderness can emerge in horror.
York Art Gallery, North Yorkshire - Not a Pot - ongoing
I’m a sucker for a “what it says on the tin” exhibition title, and York Art Gallery’s ‘Not a Pot’ is just that. The gallery’s Centre of Ceramic Art has undergone a recent redisplay, and the curatorial team have decided that pots have hogged the limelight long enough. Be gone, pots! And make way for… not pots! The reshuffle includes works by the great and the good of British ceramicists, from Bernard Leach to Ruth King, with special focus on the pioneering studio potter Gordon Baldwin, who passed away in May 2025.
“It’s 2026! God knows what fresh horrors and pleasures this year has in store for us all!” was how I opened Not London last month, and boy oh boy have the horrors been aplenty. Remember when I used to get to open this column with a cheeky comment on how London is shit?
January has certainly been bleak in the predictable dark-and-wet-and-cold way that happens every single year and yet always manages to take us by surprise. This year has felt undoubtedly bleaker.
But perhaps we can take our disgust and disappointment and use it to fuel our commitments to our communities and our rights to free expression. Spending your time and your money in a regional arts centre is a great way to do that. So, from Cornwall to Cardiff via two of the Yorkshires, here is my list of must-see exhibitions outside of London this February, with female artists and pioneering craftmakers in the spotlight.
Hopefully we will be able to resume with our usual schedule of shitting on London in the introduction soon. Fingers crossed.
Listen, I’m going to make a tenuous comparison here because I’m having caffeine withdrawal and I am *this close* to drinking some old Bovril at the back of the cupboard, which I’m sure my brain can be tricked into thinking it's caffeinated by the fact that it is both hot and brown. There is something oddly beautiful about the neon debris that glitches across old TV footage, and I was surprised to see similar, lurid sparks when I watched a video of someone looking at human ashes under a microscope. Someone less tired would now connect the two and write something astute about the fragmentation of our lives in the context of digitalisation. It would be incredibly deep. Fortunately, Paul Lemmon’s show, opening imminently at Coventry’s Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, uses corrupted YouTube footage as the source material for his large-scale oil paintings, which speak to the beautiful tension between our lives online and off. The dialogue between digital and analogue imagery in his work is incredibly satisfying and will be well worth the trip.
It has been well over 100 years since Birmingham was thought of as the “Workshop of the World” or the “City of a Thousand Trades”. Thanks to the systematic closure of British manufacturing, it can feel like the country laid down its tools a long time ago. But ‘Made in the Middle’ at the Midlands Arts Centre is here to prove that the region’s urge to create, and its craftspeople’s skill, has gone nowhere. The exhibition showcases contemporary crafts, from ceramics to metalwork, as well as textiles, jewellery and sculptures, made by 37 artists from the Midlands, aged between 22 and 82. It was curated by Craftspace, a Birmingham-based charity dedicated to the promotion of contemporary craft – a vital mission if you care about nice things ever being made again.
Bodmin, Cornwall - FLAMM - opening 28 February until 03 March
I want to go to FLAMM, but I can’t go, so I’m writing about it here will have to do. Please bear with me while I get “I didn’t go to FLAMM and all I got was this lousy article” t-shirts into production. FLAMM is a yearly contemporary arts festival in Cornwall, designed to showcase and celebrate the wealth of talented artists and craftspeople working in the South West. The region has been a haven for artists since the Victorian era, when (wealthy) creatives could use the newly-built trainlines to find out that Cornwall is significantly nicer than literally anywhere else in the country. The festival sets up shop in a different Cornish town each year, and now it’s Bodmin’s turn, with major installation commissions from five artists, heavy on ghost stories, automata, and jackdaws.
The nighttime urban scenes of Victorian cities for which John Atkinson Grimshaw is best known are beautiful. I’ll admit it’s a shame that I automatically think a murder is about to happen in them at any moment, because that’s basically all that happens at night in Victorian cities in television shows. But aside from the impending sense of peril - they’re beautiful. Leeds Art Gallery has amassed a huge collection of ‘Nocturnes’ by their home-grown hero, and ‘Don’t Let’s Ask for the Moon’ brings them all together. Included in the display is the gallery’s latest Grimshaw acquisition, Reflections on the Aire – on strike, believed to be one of the first paintings depicting the fallout of industrial action. So let this exhibition also be a reminder to join a union. Sadly, there’s not a union for whatever this is that I’m calling a career.
Watts Gallery, Surrey - Women of Influence: The Pattle Sisters - until 04 May
The Pattle Sisters had it all: they were hot, rich, and highly networked. May 2026 bring such blessings to us all! A lot of credit is given to artists for changing the course of culture, but artists would be nowhere without the wealthy patrons who enabled them to do their thing (conveniently, though, throughout history, most artists have also happened to be independently loaded). In Victorian England, there may have been none so influential as the seven (seven!?) Pattle Sisters. Included among them were a pioneering photographer (Julia), the grandmother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (Maria - ‘Mia’), and the salon hostess whose gatherings supported huge artistic, political, and scientific developments (Sara). That the exhibition celebrating the sisters is being held at Watts Gallery is wonderfully apt, due to Sara’s influence on the life of G.F. Watts.
Turner Contemporary, Kent - Bridget Riley: Learning to See - until 04 May
I want to enjoy Bridget Riley’s work more than I do, because I’m not sure that I totally *get* it (although I do hold her in the highest esteem as a pioneer), but I think a visit to ‘Learning to See’ at Turner Contemporary would sort me right out. Working closely with Riley herself - sorry, Bridget, I didn’t mean what I said earlier - the exhibition spans the entirety of her six-decade career, and showcases preparatory works on paper which have typically been left out of the spotlight. The backdrop of the Margate coastline also promises to be a nice link to Riley’s upbringing on the Cornish coast.
The Box, Devon - Beryl Cook: Pride and Joy - until 31 May
If I were going to be transformed into a figure in a painting - at random - but could choose the artist, I’d choose Beryl Cook. The odds would be very high with Cook that you’d end up as someone having the time of their life: on a girls’ night out, having a chippie tea, winning the bingo, drinking tea on the lawn in the buff. ‘Pride and Joy’ at The Box is the most extensive exhibition of Cook’s works to date, displaying more than 80 of her paintings that truly capture the joy of the everyday – even during times of major historic change. Cook’s biographies often highlight how she didn’t produce her first painting until her thirties, something regularly pointed out about ‘older’ artists to encourage aspiring creatives that “it’s never too late”. This is less and less reassuring to me as my own thirties loom ever closer. I saw a video the other day urging people that “25 is not too old” to start your dreams. Gulp.
National Museum Cardiff, Glamorgan - Gwen John: Strange Beauties - opening 07 February until 28 June
I love Gwen John because for years she was described as the “overlooked sister of her much more famous brother, Augustus John”, and now she is arguably the more celebrated sibling. You’ve got to play the long game. Celebrating her 150th birthday this year, there are several Gwen John exhibitions scheduled around the country (you only turn 150 once!) but the place to see her work, surely, is in her native Wales. Amgueddfa Cymru is bringing together rarely-seen works by John from its collections, along with major loans, to celebrate the birthday girl in the first major collection of her work in the country in more than four decades.
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridgeshire - War Craft - until 23 August
The last thing we want to think about right now is war. Even “craft” makes some people nervous. But perhaps these uncertain times are the perfect moment to visit the Fitzwilliam Museum’s new display of prints, engraved coins, and personal items, showcasing the beauty that has come out of conflicts over the centuries and across continents. Sharing stories of soldiers, civilians, and POWs, the museum displays these objects not to remind us of an inherent human will to violence, but to create. Rutger Bregman’s ‘Humankind’ might be a good read ahead of your visit to the Fitzwilliam, to help remind you that humans aren’t hardwired to be terrible bastards, and that moments of real tenderness can emerge in horror.
York Art Gallery, North Yorkshire - Not a Pot - ongoing
I’m a sucker for a “what it says on the tin” exhibition title, and York Art Gallery’s ‘Not a Pot’ is just that. The gallery’s Centre of Ceramic Art has undergone a recent redisplay, and the curatorial team have decided that pots have hogged the limelight long enough. Be gone, pots! And make way for… not pots! The reshuffle includes works by the great and the good of British ceramicists, from Bernard Leach to Ruth King, with special focus on the pioneering studio potter Gordon Baldwin, who passed away in May 2025.
“It’s 2026! God knows what fresh horrors and pleasures this year has in store for us all!” was how I opened Not London last month, and boy oh boy have the horrors been aplenty. Remember when I used to get to open this column with a cheeky comment on how London is shit?
January has certainly been bleak in the predictable dark-and-wet-and-cold way that happens every single year and yet always manages to take us by surprise. This year has felt undoubtedly bleaker.
But perhaps we can take our disgust and disappointment and use it to fuel our commitments to our communities and our rights to free expression. Spending your time and your money in a regional arts centre is a great way to do that. So, from Cornwall to Cardiff via two of the Yorkshires, here is my list of must-see exhibitions outside of London this February, with female artists and pioneering craftmakers in the spotlight.
Hopefully we will be able to resume with our usual schedule of shitting on London in the introduction soon. Fingers crossed.
Listen, I’m going to make a tenuous comparison here because I’m having caffeine withdrawal and I am *this close* to drinking some old Bovril at the back of the cupboard, which I’m sure my brain can be tricked into thinking it's caffeinated by the fact that it is both hot and brown. There is something oddly beautiful about the neon debris that glitches across old TV footage, and I was surprised to see similar, lurid sparks when I watched a video of someone looking at human ashes under a microscope. Someone less tired would now connect the two and write something astute about the fragmentation of our lives in the context of digitalisation. It would be incredibly deep. Fortunately, Paul Lemmon’s show, opening imminently at Coventry’s Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, uses corrupted YouTube footage as the source material for his large-scale oil paintings, which speak to the beautiful tension between our lives online and off. The dialogue between digital and analogue imagery in his work is incredibly satisfying and will be well worth the trip.
It has been well over 100 years since Birmingham was thought of as the “Workshop of the World” or the “City of a Thousand Trades”. Thanks to the systematic closure of British manufacturing, it can feel like the country laid down its tools a long time ago. But ‘Made in the Middle’ at the Midlands Arts Centre is here to prove that the region’s urge to create, and its craftspeople’s skill, has gone nowhere. The exhibition showcases contemporary crafts, from ceramics to metalwork, as well as textiles, jewellery and sculptures, made by 37 artists from the Midlands, aged between 22 and 82. It was curated by Craftspace, a Birmingham-based charity dedicated to the promotion of contemporary craft – a vital mission if you care about nice things ever being made again.
Bodmin, Cornwall - FLAMM - opening 28 February until 03 March
I want to go to FLAMM, but I can’t go, so I’m writing about it here will have to do. Please bear with me while I get “I didn’t go to FLAMM and all I got was this lousy article” t-shirts into production. FLAMM is a yearly contemporary arts festival in Cornwall, designed to showcase and celebrate the wealth of talented artists and craftspeople working in the South West. The region has been a haven for artists since the Victorian era, when (wealthy) creatives could use the newly-built trainlines to find out that Cornwall is significantly nicer than literally anywhere else in the country. The festival sets up shop in a different Cornish town each year, and now it’s Bodmin’s turn, with major installation commissions from five artists, heavy on ghost stories, automata, and jackdaws.
The nighttime urban scenes of Victorian cities for which John Atkinson Grimshaw is best known are beautiful. I’ll admit it’s a shame that I automatically think a murder is about to happen in them at any moment, because that’s basically all that happens at night in Victorian cities in television shows. But aside from the impending sense of peril - they’re beautiful. Leeds Art Gallery has amassed a huge collection of ‘Nocturnes’ by their home-grown hero, and ‘Don’t Let’s Ask for the Moon’ brings them all together. Included in the display is the gallery’s latest Grimshaw acquisition, Reflections on the Aire – on strike, believed to be one of the first paintings depicting the fallout of industrial action. So let this exhibition also be a reminder to join a union. Sadly, there’s not a union for whatever this is that I’m calling a career.
Watts Gallery, Surrey - Women of Influence: The Pattle Sisters - until 04 May
The Pattle Sisters had it all: they were hot, rich, and highly networked. May 2026 bring such blessings to us all! A lot of credit is given to artists for changing the course of culture, but artists would be nowhere without the wealthy patrons who enabled them to do their thing (conveniently, though, throughout history, most artists have also happened to be independently loaded). In Victorian England, there may have been none so influential as the seven (seven!?) Pattle Sisters. Included among them were a pioneering photographer (Julia), the grandmother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (Maria - ‘Mia’), and the salon hostess whose gatherings supported huge artistic, political, and scientific developments (Sara). That the exhibition celebrating the sisters is being held at Watts Gallery is wonderfully apt, due to Sara’s influence on the life of G.F. Watts.
Turner Contemporary, Kent - Bridget Riley: Learning to See - until 04 May
I want to enjoy Bridget Riley’s work more than I do, because I’m not sure that I totally *get* it (although I do hold her in the highest esteem as a pioneer), but I think a visit to ‘Learning to See’ at Turner Contemporary would sort me right out. Working closely with Riley herself - sorry, Bridget, I didn’t mean what I said earlier - the exhibition spans the entirety of her six-decade career, and showcases preparatory works on paper which have typically been left out of the spotlight. The backdrop of the Margate coastline also promises to be a nice link to Riley’s upbringing on the Cornish coast.
The Box, Devon - Beryl Cook: Pride and Joy - until 31 May
If I were going to be transformed into a figure in a painting - at random - but could choose the artist, I’d choose Beryl Cook. The odds would be very high with Cook that you’d end up as someone having the time of their life: on a girls’ night out, having a chippie tea, winning the bingo, drinking tea on the lawn in the buff. ‘Pride and Joy’ at The Box is the most extensive exhibition of Cook’s works to date, displaying more than 80 of her paintings that truly capture the joy of the everyday – even during times of major historic change. Cook’s biographies often highlight how she didn’t produce her first painting until her thirties, something regularly pointed out about ‘older’ artists to encourage aspiring creatives that “it’s never too late”. This is less and less reassuring to me as my own thirties loom ever closer. I saw a video the other day urging people that “25 is not too old” to start your dreams. Gulp.
National Museum Cardiff, Glamorgan - Gwen John: Strange Beauties - opening 07 February until 28 June
I love Gwen John because for years she was described as the “overlooked sister of her much more famous brother, Augustus John”, and now she is arguably the more celebrated sibling. You’ve got to play the long game. Celebrating her 150th birthday this year, there are several Gwen John exhibitions scheduled around the country (you only turn 150 once!) but the place to see her work, surely, is in her native Wales. Amgueddfa Cymru is bringing together rarely-seen works by John from its collections, along with major loans, to celebrate the birthday girl in the first major collection of her work in the country in more than four decades.
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridgeshire - War Craft - until 23 August
The last thing we want to think about right now is war. Even “craft” makes some people nervous. But perhaps these uncertain times are the perfect moment to visit the Fitzwilliam Museum’s new display of prints, engraved coins, and personal items, showcasing the beauty that has come out of conflicts over the centuries and across continents. Sharing stories of soldiers, civilians, and POWs, the museum displays these objects not to remind us of an inherent human will to violence, but to create. Rutger Bregman’s ‘Humankind’ might be a good read ahead of your visit to the Fitzwilliam, to help remind you that humans aren’t hardwired to be terrible bastards, and that moments of real tenderness can emerge in horror.
York Art Gallery, North Yorkshire - Not a Pot - ongoing
I’m a sucker for a “what it says on the tin” exhibition title, and York Art Gallery’s ‘Not a Pot’ is just that. The gallery’s Centre of Ceramic Art has undergone a recent redisplay, and the curatorial team have decided that pots have hogged the limelight long enough. Be gone, pots! And make way for… not pots! The reshuffle includes works by the great and the good of British ceramicists, from Bernard Leach to Ruth King, with special focus on the pioneering studio potter Gordon Baldwin, who passed away in May 2025.
“It’s 2026! God knows what fresh horrors and pleasures this year has in store for us all!” was how I opened Not London last month, and boy oh boy have the horrors been aplenty. Remember when I used to get to open this column with a cheeky comment on how London is shit?
January has certainly been bleak in the predictable dark-and-wet-and-cold way that happens every single year and yet always manages to take us by surprise. This year has felt undoubtedly bleaker.
But perhaps we can take our disgust and disappointment and use it to fuel our commitments to our communities and our rights to free expression. Spending your time and your money in a regional arts centre is a great way to do that. So, from Cornwall to Cardiff via two of the Yorkshires, here is my list of must-see exhibitions outside of London this February, with female artists and pioneering craftmakers in the spotlight.
Hopefully we will be able to resume with our usual schedule of shitting on London in the introduction soon. Fingers crossed.
Listen, I’m going to make a tenuous comparison here because I’m having caffeine withdrawal and I am *this close* to drinking some old Bovril at the back of the cupboard, which I’m sure my brain can be tricked into thinking it's caffeinated by the fact that it is both hot and brown. There is something oddly beautiful about the neon debris that glitches across old TV footage, and I was surprised to see similar, lurid sparks when I watched a video of someone looking at human ashes under a microscope. Someone less tired would now connect the two and write something astute about the fragmentation of our lives in the context of digitalisation. It would be incredibly deep. Fortunately, Paul Lemmon’s show, opening imminently at Coventry’s Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, uses corrupted YouTube footage as the source material for his large-scale oil paintings, which speak to the beautiful tension between our lives online and off. The dialogue between digital and analogue imagery in his work is incredibly satisfying and will be well worth the trip.
It has been well over 100 years since Birmingham was thought of as the “Workshop of the World” or the “City of a Thousand Trades”. Thanks to the systematic closure of British manufacturing, it can feel like the country laid down its tools a long time ago. But ‘Made in the Middle’ at the Midlands Arts Centre is here to prove that the region’s urge to create, and its craftspeople’s skill, has gone nowhere. The exhibition showcases contemporary crafts, from ceramics to metalwork, as well as textiles, jewellery and sculptures, made by 37 artists from the Midlands, aged between 22 and 82. It was curated by Craftspace, a Birmingham-based charity dedicated to the promotion of contemporary craft – a vital mission if you care about nice things ever being made again.
Bodmin, Cornwall - FLAMM - opening 28 February until 03 March
I want to go to FLAMM, but I can’t go, so I’m writing about it here will have to do. Please bear with me while I get “I didn’t go to FLAMM and all I got was this lousy article” t-shirts into production. FLAMM is a yearly contemporary arts festival in Cornwall, designed to showcase and celebrate the wealth of talented artists and craftspeople working in the South West. The region has been a haven for artists since the Victorian era, when (wealthy) creatives could use the newly-built trainlines to find out that Cornwall is significantly nicer than literally anywhere else in the country. The festival sets up shop in a different Cornish town each year, and now it’s Bodmin’s turn, with major installation commissions from five artists, heavy on ghost stories, automata, and jackdaws.
The nighttime urban scenes of Victorian cities for which John Atkinson Grimshaw is best known are beautiful. I’ll admit it’s a shame that I automatically think a murder is about to happen in them at any moment, because that’s basically all that happens at night in Victorian cities in television shows. But aside from the impending sense of peril - they’re beautiful. Leeds Art Gallery has amassed a huge collection of ‘Nocturnes’ by their home-grown hero, and ‘Don’t Let’s Ask for the Moon’ brings them all together. Included in the display is the gallery’s latest Grimshaw acquisition, Reflections on the Aire – on strike, believed to be one of the first paintings depicting the fallout of industrial action. So let this exhibition also be a reminder to join a union. Sadly, there’s not a union for whatever this is that I’m calling a career.
Watts Gallery, Surrey - Women of Influence: The Pattle Sisters - until 04 May
The Pattle Sisters had it all: they were hot, rich, and highly networked. May 2026 bring such blessings to us all! A lot of credit is given to artists for changing the course of culture, but artists would be nowhere without the wealthy patrons who enabled them to do their thing (conveniently, though, throughout history, most artists have also happened to be independently loaded). In Victorian England, there may have been none so influential as the seven (seven!?) Pattle Sisters. Included among them were a pioneering photographer (Julia), the grandmother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (Maria - ‘Mia’), and the salon hostess whose gatherings supported huge artistic, political, and scientific developments (Sara). That the exhibition celebrating the sisters is being held at Watts Gallery is wonderfully apt, due to Sara’s influence on the life of G.F. Watts.
Turner Contemporary, Kent - Bridget Riley: Learning to See - until 04 May
I want to enjoy Bridget Riley’s work more than I do, because I’m not sure that I totally *get* it (although I do hold her in the highest esteem as a pioneer), but I think a visit to ‘Learning to See’ at Turner Contemporary would sort me right out. Working closely with Riley herself - sorry, Bridget, I didn’t mean what I said earlier - the exhibition spans the entirety of her six-decade career, and showcases preparatory works on paper which have typically been left out of the spotlight. The backdrop of the Margate coastline also promises to be a nice link to Riley’s upbringing on the Cornish coast.
The Box, Devon - Beryl Cook: Pride and Joy - until 31 May
If I were going to be transformed into a figure in a painting - at random - but could choose the artist, I’d choose Beryl Cook. The odds would be very high with Cook that you’d end up as someone having the time of their life: on a girls’ night out, having a chippie tea, winning the bingo, drinking tea on the lawn in the buff. ‘Pride and Joy’ at The Box is the most extensive exhibition of Cook’s works to date, displaying more than 80 of her paintings that truly capture the joy of the everyday – even during times of major historic change. Cook’s biographies often highlight how she didn’t produce her first painting until her thirties, something regularly pointed out about ‘older’ artists to encourage aspiring creatives that “it’s never too late”. This is less and less reassuring to me as my own thirties loom ever closer. I saw a video the other day urging people that “25 is not too old” to start your dreams. Gulp.
National Museum Cardiff, Glamorgan - Gwen John: Strange Beauties - opening 07 February until 28 June
I love Gwen John because for years she was described as the “overlooked sister of her much more famous brother, Augustus John”, and now she is arguably the more celebrated sibling. You’ve got to play the long game. Celebrating her 150th birthday this year, there are several Gwen John exhibitions scheduled around the country (you only turn 150 once!) but the place to see her work, surely, is in her native Wales. Amgueddfa Cymru is bringing together rarely-seen works by John from its collections, along with major loans, to celebrate the birthday girl in the first major collection of her work in the country in more than four decades.
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridgeshire - War Craft - until 23 August
The last thing we want to think about right now is war. Even “craft” makes some people nervous. But perhaps these uncertain times are the perfect moment to visit the Fitzwilliam Museum’s new display of prints, engraved coins, and personal items, showcasing the beauty that has come out of conflicts over the centuries and across continents. Sharing stories of soldiers, civilians, and POWs, the museum displays these objects not to remind us of an inherent human will to violence, but to create. Rutger Bregman’s ‘Humankind’ might be a good read ahead of your visit to the Fitzwilliam, to help remind you that humans aren’t hardwired to be terrible bastards, and that moments of real tenderness can emerge in horror.
York Art Gallery, North Yorkshire - Not a Pot - ongoing
I’m a sucker for a “what it says on the tin” exhibition title, and York Art Gallery’s ‘Not a Pot’ is just that. The gallery’s Centre of Ceramic Art has undergone a recent redisplay, and the curatorial team have decided that pots have hogged the limelight long enough. Be gone, pots! And make way for… not pots! The reshuffle includes works by the great and the good of British ceramicists, from Bernard Leach to Ruth King, with special focus on the pioneering studio potter Gordon Baldwin, who passed away in May 2025.
“It’s 2026! God knows what fresh horrors and pleasures this year has in store for us all!” was how I opened Not London last month, and boy oh boy have the horrors been aplenty. Remember when I used to get to open this column with a cheeky comment on how London is shit?
January has certainly been bleak in the predictable dark-and-wet-and-cold way that happens every single year and yet always manages to take us by surprise. This year has felt undoubtedly bleaker.
But perhaps we can take our disgust and disappointment and use it to fuel our commitments to our communities and our rights to free expression. Spending your time and your money in a regional arts centre is a great way to do that. So, from Cornwall to Cardiff via two of the Yorkshires, here is my list of must-see exhibitions outside of London this February, with female artists and pioneering craftmakers in the spotlight.
Hopefully we will be able to resume with our usual schedule of shitting on London in the introduction soon. Fingers crossed.
Listen, I’m going to make a tenuous comparison here because I’m having caffeine withdrawal and I am *this close* to drinking some old Bovril at the back of the cupboard, which I’m sure my brain can be tricked into thinking it's caffeinated by the fact that it is both hot and brown. There is something oddly beautiful about the neon debris that glitches across old TV footage, and I was surprised to see similar, lurid sparks when I watched a video of someone looking at human ashes under a microscope. Someone less tired would now connect the two and write something astute about the fragmentation of our lives in the context of digitalisation. It would be incredibly deep. Fortunately, Paul Lemmon’s show, opening imminently at Coventry’s Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, uses corrupted YouTube footage as the source material for his large-scale oil paintings, which speak to the beautiful tension between our lives online and off. The dialogue between digital and analogue imagery in his work is incredibly satisfying and will be well worth the trip.
It has been well over 100 years since Birmingham was thought of as the “Workshop of the World” or the “City of a Thousand Trades”. Thanks to the systematic closure of British manufacturing, it can feel like the country laid down its tools a long time ago. But ‘Made in the Middle’ at the Midlands Arts Centre is here to prove that the region’s urge to create, and its craftspeople’s skill, has gone nowhere. The exhibition showcases contemporary crafts, from ceramics to metalwork, as well as textiles, jewellery and sculptures, made by 37 artists from the Midlands, aged between 22 and 82. It was curated by Craftspace, a Birmingham-based charity dedicated to the promotion of contemporary craft – a vital mission if you care about nice things ever being made again.
Bodmin, Cornwall - FLAMM - opening 28 February until 03 March
I want to go to FLAMM, but I can’t go, so I’m writing about it here will have to do. Please bear with me while I get “I didn’t go to FLAMM and all I got was this lousy article” t-shirts into production. FLAMM is a yearly contemporary arts festival in Cornwall, designed to showcase and celebrate the wealth of talented artists and craftspeople working in the South West. The region has been a haven for artists since the Victorian era, when (wealthy) creatives could use the newly-built trainlines to find out that Cornwall is significantly nicer than literally anywhere else in the country. The festival sets up shop in a different Cornish town each year, and now it’s Bodmin’s turn, with major installation commissions from five artists, heavy on ghost stories, automata, and jackdaws.
The nighttime urban scenes of Victorian cities for which John Atkinson Grimshaw is best known are beautiful. I’ll admit it’s a shame that I automatically think a murder is about to happen in them at any moment, because that’s basically all that happens at night in Victorian cities in television shows. But aside from the impending sense of peril - they’re beautiful. Leeds Art Gallery has amassed a huge collection of ‘Nocturnes’ by their home-grown hero, and ‘Don’t Let’s Ask for the Moon’ brings them all together. Included in the display is the gallery’s latest Grimshaw acquisition, Reflections on the Aire – on strike, believed to be one of the first paintings depicting the fallout of industrial action. So let this exhibition also be a reminder to join a union. Sadly, there’s not a union for whatever this is that I’m calling a career.
Watts Gallery, Surrey - Women of Influence: The Pattle Sisters - until 04 May
The Pattle Sisters had it all: they were hot, rich, and highly networked. May 2026 bring such blessings to us all! A lot of credit is given to artists for changing the course of culture, but artists would be nowhere without the wealthy patrons who enabled them to do their thing (conveniently, though, throughout history, most artists have also happened to be independently loaded). In Victorian England, there may have been none so influential as the seven (seven!?) Pattle Sisters. Included among them were a pioneering photographer (Julia), the grandmother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (Maria - ‘Mia’), and the salon hostess whose gatherings supported huge artistic, political, and scientific developments (Sara). That the exhibition celebrating the sisters is being held at Watts Gallery is wonderfully apt, due to Sara’s influence on the life of G.F. Watts.
Turner Contemporary, Kent - Bridget Riley: Learning to See - until 04 May
I want to enjoy Bridget Riley’s work more than I do, because I’m not sure that I totally *get* it (although I do hold her in the highest esteem as a pioneer), but I think a visit to ‘Learning to See’ at Turner Contemporary would sort me right out. Working closely with Riley herself - sorry, Bridget, I didn’t mean what I said earlier - the exhibition spans the entirety of her six-decade career, and showcases preparatory works on paper which have typically been left out of the spotlight. The backdrop of the Margate coastline also promises to be a nice link to Riley’s upbringing on the Cornish coast.
The Box, Devon - Beryl Cook: Pride and Joy - until 31 May
If I were going to be transformed into a figure in a painting - at random - but could choose the artist, I’d choose Beryl Cook. The odds would be very high with Cook that you’d end up as someone having the time of their life: on a girls’ night out, having a chippie tea, winning the bingo, drinking tea on the lawn in the buff. ‘Pride and Joy’ at The Box is the most extensive exhibition of Cook’s works to date, displaying more than 80 of her paintings that truly capture the joy of the everyday – even during times of major historic change. Cook’s biographies often highlight how she didn’t produce her first painting until her thirties, something regularly pointed out about ‘older’ artists to encourage aspiring creatives that “it’s never too late”. This is less and less reassuring to me as my own thirties loom ever closer. I saw a video the other day urging people that “25 is not too old” to start your dreams. Gulp.
National Museum Cardiff, Glamorgan - Gwen John: Strange Beauties - opening 07 February until 28 June
I love Gwen John because for years she was described as the “overlooked sister of her much more famous brother, Augustus John”, and now she is arguably the more celebrated sibling. You’ve got to play the long game. Celebrating her 150th birthday this year, there are several Gwen John exhibitions scheduled around the country (you only turn 150 once!) but the place to see her work, surely, is in her native Wales. Amgueddfa Cymru is bringing together rarely-seen works by John from its collections, along with major loans, to celebrate the birthday girl in the first major collection of her work in the country in more than four decades.
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridgeshire - War Craft - until 23 August
The last thing we want to think about right now is war. Even “craft” makes some people nervous. But perhaps these uncertain times are the perfect moment to visit the Fitzwilliam Museum’s new display of prints, engraved coins, and personal items, showcasing the beauty that has come out of conflicts over the centuries and across continents. Sharing stories of soldiers, civilians, and POWs, the museum displays these objects not to remind us of an inherent human will to violence, but to create. Rutger Bregman’s ‘Humankind’ might be a good read ahead of your visit to the Fitzwilliam, to help remind you that humans aren’t hardwired to be terrible bastards, and that moments of real tenderness can emerge in horror.
York Art Gallery, North Yorkshire - Not a Pot - ongoing
I’m a sucker for a “what it says on the tin” exhibition title, and York Art Gallery’s ‘Not a Pot’ is just that. The gallery’s Centre of Ceramic Art has undergone a recent redisplay, and the curatorial team have decided that pots have hogged the limelight long enough. Be gone, pots! And make way for… not pots! The reshuffle includes works by the great and the good of British ceramicists, from Bernard Leach to Ruth King, with special focus on the pioneering studio potter Gordon Baldwin, who passed away in May 2025.
“It’s 2026! God knows what fresh horrors and pleasures this year has in store for us all!” was how I opened Not London last month, and boy oh boy have the horrors been aplenty. Remember when I used to get to open this column with a cheeky comment on how London is shit?
January has certainly been bleak in the predictable dark-and-wet-and-cold way that happens every single year and yet always manages to take us by surprise. This year has felt undoubtedly bleaker.
But perhaps we can take our disgust and disappointment and use it to fuel our commitments to our communities and our rights to free expression. Spending your time and your money in a regional arts centre is a great way to do that. So, from Cornwall to Cardiff via two of the Yorkshires, here is my list of must-see exhibitions outside of London this February, with female artists and pioneering craftmakers in the spotlight.
Hopefully we will be able to resume with our usual schedule of shitting on London in the introduction soon. Fingers crossed.
Listen, I’m going to make a tenuous comparison here because I’m having caffeine withdrawal and I am *this close* to drinking some old Bovril at the back of the cupboard, which I’m sure my brain can be tricked into thinking it's caffeinated by the fact that it is both hot and brown. There is something oddly beautiful about the neon debris that glitches across old TV footage, and I was surprised to see similar, lurid sparks when I watched a video of someone looking at human ashes under a microscope. Someone less tired would now connect the two and write something astute about the fragmentation of our lives in the context of digitalisation. It would be incredibly deep. Fortunately, Paul Lemmon’s show, opening imminently at Coventry’s Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, uses corrupted YouTube footage as the source material for his large-scale oil paintings, which speak to the beautiful tension between our lives online and off. The dialogue between digital and analogue imagery in his work is incredibly satisfying and will be well worth the trip.
It has been well over 100 years since Birmingham was thought of as the “Workshop of the World” or the “City of a Thousand Trades”. Thanks to the systematic closure of British manufacturing, it can feel like the country laid down its tools a long time ago. But ‘Made in the Middle’ at the Midlands Arts Centre is here to prove that the region’s urge to create, and its craftspeople’s skill, has gone nowhere. The exhibition showcases contemporary crafts, from ceramics to metalwork, as well as textiles, jewellery and sculptures, made by 37 artists from the Midlands, aged between 22 and 82. It was curated by Craftspace, a Birmingham-based charity dedicated to the promotion of contemporary craft – a vital mission if you care about nice things ever being made again.
Bodmin, Cornwall - FLAMM - opening 28 February until 03 March
I want to go to FLAMM, but I can’t go, so I’m writing about it here will have to do. Please bear with me while I get “I didn’t go to FLAMM and all I got was this lousy article” t-shirts into production. FLAMM is a yearly contemporary arts festival in Cornwall, designed to showcase and celebrate the wealth of talented artists and craftspeople working in the South West. The region has been a haven for artists since the Victorian era, when (wealthy) creatives could use the newly-built trainlines to find out that Cornwall is significantly nicer than literally anywhere else in the country. The festival sets up shop in a different Cornish town each year, and now it’s Bodmin’s turn, with major installation commissions from five artists, heavy on ghost stories, automata, and jackdaws.
The nighttime urban scenes of Victorian cities for which John Atkinson Grimshaw is best known are beautiful. I’ll admit it’s a shame that I automatically think a murder is about to happen in them at any moment, because that’s basically all that happens at night in Victorian cities in television shows. But aside from the impending sense of peril - they’re beautiful. Leeds Art Gallery has amassed a huge collection of ‘Nocturnes’ by their home-grown hero, and ‘Don’t Let’s Ask for the Moon’ brings them all together. Included in the display is the gallery’s latest Grimshaw acquisition, Reflections on the Aire – on strike, believed to be one of the first paintings depicting the fallout of industrial action. So let this exhibition also be a reminder to join a union. Sadly, there’s not a union for whatever this is that I’m calling a career.
Watts Gallery, Surrey - Women of Influence: The Pattle Sisters - until 04 May
The Pattle Sisters had it all: they were hot, rich, and highly networked. May 2026 bring such blessings to us all! A lot of credit is given to artists for changing the course of culture, but artists would be nowhere without the wealthy patrons who enabled them to do their thing (conveniently, though, throughout history, most artists have also happened to be independently loaded). In Victorian England, there may have been none so influential as the seven (seven!?) Pattle Sisters. Included among them were a pioneering photographer (Julia), the grandmother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (Maria - ‘Mia’), and the salon hostess whose gatherings supported huge artistic, political, and scientific developments (Sara). That the exhibition celebrating the sisters is being held at Watts Gallery is wonderfully apt, due to Sara’s influence on the life of G.F. Watts.
Turner Contemporary, Kent - Bridget Riley: Learning to See - until 04 May
I want to enjoy Bridget Riley’s work more than I do, because I’m not sure that I totally *get* it (although I do hold her in the highest esteem as a pioneer), but I think a visit to ‘Learning to See’ at Turner Contemporary would sort me right out. Working closely with Riley herself - sorry, Bridget, I didn’t mean what I said earlier - the exhibition spans the entirety of her six-decade career, and showcases preparatory works on paper which have typically been left out of the spotlight. The backdrop of the Margate coastline also promises to be a nice link to Riley’s upbringing on the Cornish coast.
The Box, Devon - Beryl Cook: Pride and Joy - until 31 May
If I were going to be transformed into a figure in a painting - at random - but could choose the artist, I’d choose Beryl Cook. The odds would be very high with Cook that you’d end up as someone having the time of their life: on a girls’ night out, having a chippie tea, winning the bingo, drinking tea on the lawn in the buff. ‘Pride and Joy’ at The Box is the most extensive exhibition of Cook’s works to date, displaying more than 80 of her paintings that truly capture the joy of the everyday – even during times of major historic change. Cook’s biographies often highlight how she didn’t produce her first painting until her thirties, something regularly pointed out about ‘older’ artists to encourage aspiring creatives that “it’s never too late”. This is less and less reassuring to me as my own thirties loom ever closer. I saw a video the other day urging people that “25 is not too old” to start your dreams. Gulp.
National Museum Cardiff, Glamorgan - Gwen John: Strange Beauties - opening 07 February until 28 June
I love Gwen John because for years she was described as the “overlooked sister of her much more famous brother, Augustus John”, and now she is arguably the more celebrated sibling. You’ve got to play the long game. Celebrating her 150th birthday this year, there are several Gwen John exhibitions scheduled around the country (you only turn 150 once!) but the place to see her work, surely, is in her native Wales. Amgueddfa Cymru is bringing together rarely-seen works by John from its collections, along with major loans, to celebrate the birthday girl in the first major collection of her work in the country in more than four decades.
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridgeshire - War Craft - until 23 August
The last thing we want to think about right now is war. Even “craft” makes some people nervous. But perhaps these uncertain times are the perfect moment to visit the Fitzwilliam Museum’s new display of prints, engraved coins, and personal items, showcasing the beauty that has come out of conflicts over the centuries and across continents. Sharing stories of soldiers, civilians, and POWs, the museum displays these objects not to remind us of an inherent human will to violence, but to create. Rutger Bregman’s ‘Humankind’ might be a good read ahead of your visit to the Fitzwilliam, to help remind you that humans aren’t hardwired to be terrible bastards, and that moments of real tenderness can emerge in horror.
York Art Gallery, North Yorkshire - Not a Pot - ongoing
I’m a sucker for a “what it says on the tin” exhibition title, and York Art Gallery’s ‘Not a Pot’ is just that. The gallery’s Centre of Ceramic Art has undergone a recent redisplay, and the curatorial team have decided that pots have hogged the limelight long enough. Be gone, pots! And make way for… not pots! The reshuffle includes works by the great and the good of British ceramicists, from Bernard Leach to Ruth King, with special focus on the pioneering studio potter Gordon Baldwin, who passed away in May 2025.
“It’s 2026! God knows what fresh horrors and pleasures this year has in store for us all!” was how I opened Not London last month, and boy oh boy have the horrors been aplenty. Remember when I used to get to open this column with a cheeky comment on how London is shit?
January has certainly been bleak in the predictable dark-and-wet-and-cold way that happens every single year and yet always manages to take us by surprise. This year has felt undoubtedly bleaker.
But perhaps we can take our disgust and disappointment and use it to fuel our commitments to our communities and our rights to free expression. Spending your time and your money in a regional arts centre is a great way to do that. So, from Cornwall to Cardiff via two of the Yorkshires, here is my list of must-see exhibitions outside of London this February, with female artists and pioneering craftmakers in the spotlight.
Hopefully we will be able to resume with our usual schedule of shitting on London in the introduction soon. Fingers crossed.
Listen, I’m going to make a tenuous comparison here because I’m having caffeine withdrawal and I am *this close* to drinking some old Bovril at the back of the cupboard, which I’m sure my brain can be tricked into thinking it's caffeinated by the fact that it is both hot and brown. There is something oddly beautiful about the neon debris that glitches across old TV footage, and I was surprised to see similar, lurid sparks when I watched a video of someone looking at human ashes under a microscope. Someone less tired would now connect the two and write something astute about the fragmentation of our lives in the context of digitalisation. It would be incredibly deep. Fortunately, Paul Lemmon’s show, opening imminently at Coventry’s Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, uses corrupted YouTube footage as the source material for his large-scale oil paintings, which speak to the beautiful tension between our lives online and off. The dialogue between digital and analogue imagery in his work is incredibly satisfying and will be well worth the trip.
It has been well over 100 years since Birmingham was thought of as the “Workshop of the World” or the “City of a Thousand Trades”. Thanks to the systematic closure of British manufacturing, it can feel like the country laid down its tools a long time ago. But ‘Made in the Middle’ at the Midlands Arts Centre is here to prove that the region’s urge to create, and its craftspeople’s skill, has gone nowhere. The exhibition showcases contemporary crafts, from ceramics to metalwork, as well as textiles, jewellery and sculptures, made by 37 artists from the Midlands, aged between 22 and 82. It was curated by Craftspace, a Birmingham-based charity dedicated to the promotion of contemporary craft – a vital mission if you care about nice things ever being made again.
Bodmin, Cornwall - FLAMM - opening 28 February until 03 March
I want to go to FLAMM, but I can’t go, so I’m writing about it here will have to do. Please bear with me while I get “I didn’t go to FLAMM and all I got was this lousy article” t-shirts into production. FLAMM is a yearly contemporary arts festival in Cornwall, designed to showcase and celebrate the wealth of talented artists and craftspeople working in the South West. The region has been a haven for artists since the Victorian era, when (wealthy) creatives could use the newly-built trainlines to find out that Cornwall is significantly nicer than literally anywhere else in the country. The festival sets up shop in a different Cornish town each year, and now it’s Bodmin’s turn, with major installation commissions from five artists, heavy on ghost stories, automata, and jackdaws.
The nighttime urban scenes of Victorian cities for which John Atkinson Grimshaw is best known are beautiful. I’ll admit it’s a shame that I automatically think a murder is about to happen in them at any moment, because that’s basically all that happens at night in Victorian cities in television shows. But aside from the impending sense of peril - they’re beautiful. Leeds Art Gallery has amassed a huge collection of ‘Nocturnes’ by their home-grown hero, and ‘Don’t Let’s Ask for the Moon’ brings them all together. Included in the display is the gallery’s latest Grimshaw acquisition, Reflections on the Aire – on strike, believed to be one of the first paintings depicting the fallout of industrial action. So let this exhibition also be a reminder to join a union. Sadly, there’s not a union for whatever this is that I’m calling a career.
Watts Gallery, Surrey - Women of Influence: The Pattle Sisters - until 04 May
The Pattle Sisters had it all: they were hot, rich, and highly networked. May 2026 bring such blessings to us all! A lot of credit is given to artists for changing the course of culture, but artists would be nowhere without the wealthy patrons who enabled them to do their thing (conveniently, though, throughout history, most artists have also happened to be independently loaded). In Victorian England, there may have been none so influential as the seven (seven!?) Pattle Sisters. Included among them were a pioneering photographer (Julia), the grandmother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (Maria - ‘Mia’), and the salon hostess whose gatherings supported huge artistic, political, and scientific developments (Sara). That the exhibition celebrating the sisters is being held at Watts Gallery is wonderfully apt, due to Sara’s influence on the life of G.F. Watts.
Turner Contemporary, Kent - Bridget Riley: Learning to See - until 04 May
I want to enjoy Bridget Riley’s work more than I do, because I’m not sure that I totally *get* it (although I do hold her in the highest esteem as a pioneer), but I think a visit to ‘Learning to See’ at Turner Contemporary would sort me right out. Working closely with Riley herself - sorry, Bridget, I didn’t mean what I said earlier - the exhibition spans the entirety of her six-decade career, and showcases preparatory works on paper which have typically been left out of the spotlight. The backdrop of the Margate coastline also promises to be a nice link to Riley’s upbringing on the Cornish coast.
The Box, Devon - Beryl Cook: Pride and Joy - until 31 May
If I were going to be transformed into a figure in a painting - at random - but could choose the artist, I’d choose Beryl Cook. The odds would be very high with Cook that you’d end up as someone having the time of their life: on a girls’ night out, having a chippie tea, winning the bingo, drinking tea on the lawn in the buff. ‘Pride and Joy’ at The Box is the most extensive exhibition of Cook’s works to date, displaying more than 80 of her paintings that truly capture the joy of the everyday – even during times of major historic change. Cook’s biographies often highlight how she didn’t produce her first painting until her thirties, something regularly pointed out about ‘older’ artists to encourage aspiring creatives that “it’s never too late”. This is less and less reassuring to me as my own thirties loom ever closer. I saw a video the other day urging people that “25 is not too old” to start your dreams. Gulp.
National Museum Cardiff, Glamorgan - Gwen John: Strange Beauties - opening 07 February until 28 June
I love Gwen John because for years she was described as the “overlooked sister of her much more famous brother, Augustus John”, and now she is arguably the more celebrated sibling. You’ve got to play the long game. Celebrating her 150th birthday this year, there are several Gwen John exhibitions scheduled around the country (you only turn 150 once!) but the place to see her work, surely, is in her native Wales. Amgueddfa Cymru is bringing together rarely-seen works by John from its collections, along with major loans, to celebrate the birthday girl in the first major collection of her work in the country in more than four decades.
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridgeshire - War Craft - until 23 August
The last thing we want to think about right now is war. Even “craft” makes some people nervous. But perhaps these uncertain times are the perfect moment to visit the Fitzwilliam Museum’s new display of prints, engraved coins, and personal items, showcasing the beauty that has come out of conflicts over the centuries and across continents. Sharing stories of soldiers, civilians, and POWs, the museum displays these objects not to remind us of an inherent human will to violence, but to create. Rutger Bregman’s ‘Humankind’ might be a good read ahead of your visit to the Fitzwilliam, to help remind you that humans aren’t hardwired to be terrible bastards, and that moments of real tenderness can emerge in horror.
York Art Gallery, North Yorkshire - Not a Pot - ongoing
I’m a sucker for a “what it says on the tin” exhibition title, and York Art Gallery’s ‘Not a Pot’ is just that. The gallery’s Centre of Ceramic Art has undergone a recent redisplay, and the curatorial team have decided that pots have hogged the limelight long enough. Be gone, pots! And make way for… not pots! The reshuffle includes works by the great and the good of British ceramicists, from Bernard Leach to Ruth King, with special focus on the pioneering studio potter Gordon Baldwin, who passed away in May 2025.
“It’s 2026! God knows what fresh horrors and pleasures this year has in store for us all!” was how I opened Not London last month, and boy oh boy have the horrors been aplenty. Remember when I used to get to open this column with a cheeky comment on how London is shit?
January has certainly been bleak in the predictable dark-and-wet-and-cold way that happens every single year and yet always manages to take us by surprise. This year has felt undoubtedly bleaker.
But perhaps we can take our disgust and disappointment and use it to fuel our commitments to our communities and our rights to free expression. Spending your time and your money in a regional arts centre is a great way to do that. So, from Cornwall to Cardiff via two of the Yorkshires, here is my list of must-see exhibitions outside of London this February, with female artists and pioneering craftmakers in the spotlight.
Hopefully we will be able to resume with our usual schedule of shitting on London in the introduction soon. Fingers crossed.
Listen, I’m going to make a tenuous comparison here because I’m having caffeine withdrawal and I am *this close* to drinking some old Bovril at the back of the cupboard, which I’m sure my brain can be tricked into thinking it's caffeinated by the fact that it is both hot and brown. There is something oddly beautiful about the neon debris that glitches across old TV footage, and I was surprised to see similar, lurid sparks when I watched a video of someone looking at human ashes under a microscope. Someone less tired would now connect the two and write something astute about the fragmentation of our lives in the context of digitalisation. It would be incredibly deep. Fortunately, Paul Lemmon’s show, opening imminently at Coventry’s Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, uses corrupted YouTube footage as the source material for his large-scale oil paintings, which speak to the beautiful tension between our lives online and off. The dialogue between digital and analogue imagery in his work is incredibly satisfying and will be well worth the trip.
It has been well over 100 years since Birmingham was thought of as the “Workshop of the World” or the “City of a Thousand Trades”. Thanks to the systematic closure of British manufacturing, it can feel like the country laid down its tools a long time ago. But ‘Made in the Middle’ at the Midlands Arts Centre is here to prove that the region’s urge to create, and its craftspeople’s skill, has gone nowhere. The exhibition showcases contemporary crafts, from ceramics to metalwork, as well as textiles, jewellery and sculptures, made by 37 artists from the Midlands, aged between 22 and 82. It was curated by Craftspace, a Birmingham-based charity dedicated to the promotion of contemporary craft – a vital mission if you care about nice things ever being made again.
Bodmin, Cornwall - FLAMM - opening 28 February until 03 March
I want to go to FLAMM, but I can’t go, so I’m writing about it here will have to do. Please bear with me while I get “I didn’t go to FLAMM and all I got was this lousy article” t-shirts into production. FLAMM is a yearly contemporary arts festival in Cornwall, designed to showcase and celebrate the wealth of talented artists and craftspeople working in the South West. The region has been a haven for artists since the Victorian era, when (wealthy) creatives could use the newly-built trainlines to find out that Cornwall is significantly nicer than literally anywhere else in the country. The festival sets up shop in a different Cornish town each year, and now it’s Bodmin’s turn, with major installation commissions from five artists, heavy on ghost stories, automata, and jackdaws.
The nighttime urban scenes of Victorian cities for which John Atkinson Grimshaw is best known are beautiful. I’ll admit it’s a shame that I automatically think a murder is about to happen in them at any moment, because that’s basically all that happens at night in Victorian cities in television shows. But aside from the impending sense of peril - they’re beautiful. Leeds Art Gallery has amassed a huge collection of ‘Nocturnes’ by their home-grown hero, and ‘Don’t Let’s Ask for the Moon’ brings them all together. Included in the display is the gallery’s latest Grimshaw acquisition, Reflections on the Aire – on strike, believed to be one of the first paintings depicting the fallout of industrial action. So let this exhibition also be a reminder to join a union. Sadly, there’s not a union for whatever this is that I’m calling a career.
Watts Gallery, Surrey - Women of Influence: The Pattle Sisters - until 04 May
The Pattle Sisters had it all: they were hot, rich, and highly networked. May 2026 bring such blessings to us all! A lot of credit is given to artists for changing the course of culture, but artists would be nowhere without the wealthy patrons who enabled them to do their thing (conveniently, though, throughout history, most artists have also happened to be independently loaded). In Victorian England, there may have been none so influential as the seven (seven!?) Pattle Sisters. Included among them were a pioneering photographer (Julia), the grandmother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (Maria - ‘Mia’), and the salon hostess whose gatherings supported huge artistic, political, and scientific developments (Sara). That the exhibition celebrating the sisters is being held at Watts Gallery is wonderfully apt, due to Sara’s influence on the life of G.F. Watts.
Turner Contemporary, Kent - Bridget Riley: Learning to See - until 04 May
I want to enjoy Bridget Riley’s work more than I do, because I’m not sure that I totally *get* it (although I do hold her in the highest esteem as a pioneer), but I think a visit to ‘Learning to See’ at Turner Contemporary would sort me right out. Working closely with Riley herself - sorry, Bridget, I didn’t mean what I said earlier - the exhibition spans the entirety of her six-decade career, and showcases preparatory works on paper which have typically been left out of the spotlight. The backdrop of the Margate coastline also promises to be a nice link to Riley’s upbringing on the Cornish coast.
The Box, Devon - Beryl Cook: Pride and Joy - until 31 May
If I were going to be transformed into a figure in a painting - at random - but could choose the artist, I’d choose Beryl Cook. The odds would be very high with Cook that you’d end up as someone having the time of their life: on a girls’ night out, having a chippie tea, winning the bingo, drinking tea on the lawn in the buff. ‘Pride and Joy’ at The Box is the most extensive exhibition of Cook’s works to date, displaying more than 80 of her paintings that truly capture the joy of the everyday – even during times of major historic change. Cook’s biographies often highlight how she didn’t produce her first painting until her thirties, something regularly pointed out about ‘older’ artists to encourage aspiring creatives that “it’s never too late”. This is less and less reassuring to me as my own thirties loom ever closer. I saw a video the other day urging people that “25 is not too old” to start your dreams. Gulp.
National Museum Cardiff, Glamorgan - Gwen John: Strange Beauties - opening 07 February until 28 June
I love Gwen John because for years she was described as the “overlooked sister of her much more famous brother, Augustus John”, and now she is arguably the more celebrated sibling. You’ve got to play the long game. Celebrating her 150th birthday this year, there are several Gwen John exhibitions scheduled around the country (you only turn 150 once!) but the place to see her work, surely, is in her native Wales. Amgueddfa Cymru is bringing together rarely-seen works by John from its collections, along with major loans, to celebrate the birthday girl in the first major collection of her work in the country in more than four decades.
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridgeshire - War Craft - until 23 August
The last thing we want to think about right now is war. Even “craft” makes some people nervous. But perhaps these uncertain times are the perfect moment to visit the Fitzwilliam Museum’s new display of prints, engraved coins, and personal items, showcasing the beauty that has come out of conflicts over the centuries and across continents. Sharing stories of soldiers, civilians, and POWs, the museum displays these objects not to remind us of an inherent human will to violence, but to create. Rutger Bregman’s ‘Humankind’ might be a good read ahead of your visit to the Fitzwilliam, to help remind you that humans aren’t hardwired to be terrible bastards, and that moments of real tenderness can emerge in horror.
York Art Gallery, North Yorkshire - Not a Pot - ongoing
I’m a sucker for a “what it says on the tin” exhibition title, and York Art Gallery’s ‘Not a Pot’ is just that. The gallery’s Centre of Ceramic Art has undergone a recent redisplay, and the curatorial team have decided that pots have hogged the limelight long enough. Be gone, pots! And make way for… not pots! The reshuffle includes works by the great and the good of British ceramicists, from Bernard Leach to Ruth King, with special focus on the pioneering studio potter Gordon Baldwin, who passed away in May 2025.
“It’s 2026! God knows what fresh horrors and pleasures this year has in store for us all!” was how I opened Not London last month, and boy oh boy have the horrors been aplenty. Remember when I used to get to open this column with a cheeky comment on how London is shit?
January has certainly been bleak in the predictable dark-and-wet-and-cold way that happens every single year and yet always manages to take us by surprise. This year has felt undoubtedly bleaker.
But perhaps we can take our disgust and disappointment and use it to fuel our commitments to our communities and our rights to free expression. Spending your time and your money in a regional arts centre is a great way to do that. So, from Cornwall to Cardiff via two of the Yorkshires, here is my list of must-see exhibitions outside of London this February, with female artists and pioneering craftmakers in the spotlight.
Hopefully we will be able to resume with our usual schedule of shitting on London in the introduction soon. Fingers crossed.
Listen, I’m going to make a tenuous comparison here because I’m having caffeine withdrawal and I am *this close* to drinking some old Bovril at the back of the cupboard, which I’m sure my brain can be tricked into thinking it's caffeinated by the fact that it is both hot and brown. There is something oddly beautiful about the neon debris that glitches across old TV footage, and I was surprised to see similar, lurid sparks when I watched a video of someone looking at human ashes under a microscope. Someone less tired would now connect the two and write something astute about the fragmentation of our lives in the context of digitalisation. It would be incredibly deep. Fortunately, Paul Lemmon’s show, opening imminently at Coventry’s Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, uses corrupted YouTube footage as the source material for his large-scale oil paintings, which speak to the beautiful tension between our lives online and off. The dialogue between digital and analogue imagery in his work is incredibly satisfying and will be well worth the trip.
It has been well over 100 years since Birmingham was thought of as the “Workshop of the World” or the “City of a Thousand Trades”. Thanks to the systematic closure of British manufacturing, it can feel like the country laid down its tools a long time ago. But ‘Made in the Middle’ at the Midlands Arts Centre is here to prove that the region’s urge to create, and its craftspeople’s skill, has gone nowhere. The exhibition showcases contemporary crafts, from ceramics to metalwork, as well as textiles, jewellery and sculptures, made by 37 artists from the Midlands, aged between 22 and 82. It was curated by Craftspace, a Birmingham-based charity dedicated to the promotion of contemporary craft – a vital mission if you care about nice things ever being made again.
Bodmin, Cornwall - FLAMM - opening 28 February until 03 March
I want to go to FLAMM, but I can’t go, so I’m writing about it here will have to do. Please bear with me while I get “I didn’t go to FLAMM and all I got was this lousy article” t-shirts into production. FLAMM is a yearly contemporary arts festival in Cornwall, designed to showcase and celebrate the wealth of talented artists and craftspeople working in the South West. The region has been a haven for artists since the Victorian era, when (wealthy) creatives could use the newly-built trainlines to find out that Cornwall is significantly nicer than literally anywhere else in the country. The festival sets up shop in a different Cornish town each year, and now it’s Bodmin’s turn, with major installation commissions from five artists, heavy on ghost stories, automata, and jackdaws.
The nighttime urban scenes of Victorian cities for which John Atkinson Grimshaw is best known are beautiful. I’ll admit it’s a shame that I automatically think a murder is about to happen in them at any moment, because that’s basically all that happens at night in Victorian cities in television shows. But aside from the impending sense of peril - they’re beautiful. Leeds Art Gallery has amassed a huge collection of ‘Nocturnes’ by their home-grown hero, and ‘Don’t Let’s Ask for the Moon’ brings them all together. Included in the display is the gallery’s latest Grimshaw acquisition, Reflections on the Aire – on strike, believed to be one of the first paintings depicting the fallout of industrial action. So let this exhibition also be a reminder to join a union. Sadly, there’s not a union for whatever this is that I’m calling a career.
Watts Gallery, Surrey - Women of Influence: The Pattle Sisters - until 04 May
The Pattle Sisters had it all: they were hot, rich, and highly networked. May 2026 bring such blessings to us all! A lot of credit is given to artists for changing the course of culture, but artists would be nowhere without the wealthy patrons who enabled them to do their thing (conveniently, though, throughout history, most artists have also happened to be independently loaded). In Victorian England, there may have been none so influential as the seven (seven!?) Pattle Sisters. Included among them were a pioneering photographer (Julia), the grandmother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (Maria - ‘Mia’), and the salon hostess whose gatherings supported huge artistic, political, and scientific developments (Sara). That the exhibition celebrating the sisters is being held at Watts Gallery is wonderfully apt, due to Sara’s influence on the life of G.F. Watts.
Turner Contemporary, Kent - Bridget Riley: Learning to See - until 04 May
I want to enjoy Bridget Riley’s work more than I do, because I’m not sure that I totally *get* it (although I do hold her in the highest esteem as a pioneer), but I think a visit to ‘Learning to See’ at Turner Contemporary would sort me right out. Working closely with Riley herself - sorry, Bridget, I didn’t mean what I said earlier - the exhibition spans the entirety of her six-decade career, and showcases preparatory works on paper which have typically been left out of the spotlight. The backdrop of the Margate coastline also promises to be a nice link to Riley’s upbringing on the Cornish coast.
The Box, Devon - Beryl Cook: Pride and Joy - until 31 May
If I were going to be transformed into a figure in a painting - at random - but could choose the artist, I’d choose Beryl Cook. The odds would be very high with Cook that you’d end up as someone having the time of their life: on a girls’ night out, having a chippie tea, winning the bingo, drinking tea on the lawn in the buff. ‘Pride and Joy’ at The Box is the most extensive exhibition of Cook’s works to date, displaying more than 80 of her paintings that truly capture the joy of the everyday – even during times of major historic change. Cook’s biographies often highlight how she didn’t produce her first painting until her thirties, something regularly pointed out about ‘older’ artists to encourage aspiring creatives that “it’s never too late”. This is less and less reassuring to me as my own thirties loom ever closer. I saw a video the other day urging people that “25 is not too old” to start your dreams. Gulp.
National Museum Cardiff, Glamorgan - Gwen John: Strange Beauties - opening 07 February until 28 June
I love Gwen John because for years she was described as the “overlooked sister of her much more famous brother, Augustus John”, and now she is arguably the more celebrated sibling. You’ve got to play the long game. Celebrating her 150th birthday this year, there are several Gwen John exhibitions scheduled around the country (you only turn 150 once!) but the place to see her work, surely, is in her native Wales. Amgueddfa Cymru is bringing together rarely-seen works by John from its collections, along with major loans, to celebrate the birthday girl in the first major collection of her work in the country in more than four decades.
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridgeshire - War Craft - until 23 August
The last thing we want to think about right now is war. Even “craft” makes some people nervous. But perhaps these uncertain times are the perfect moment to visit the Fitzwilliam Museum’s new display of prints, engraved coins, and personal items, showcasing the beauty that has come out of conflicts over the centuries and across continents. Sharing stories of soldiers, civilians, and POWs, the museum displays these objects not to remind us of an inherent human will to violence, but to create. Rutger Bregman’s ‘Humankind’ might be a good read ahead of your visit to the Fitzwilliam, to help remind you that humans aren’t hardwired to be terrible bastards, and that moments of real tenderness can emerge in horror.
York Art Gallery, North Yorkshire - Not a Pot - ongoing
I’m a sucker for a “what it says on the tin” exhibition title, and York Art Gallery’s ‘Not a Pot’ is just that. The gallery’s Centre of Ceramic Art has undergone a recent redisplay, and the curatorial team have decided that pots have hogged the limelight long enough. Be gone, pots! And make way for… not pots! The reshuffle includes works by the great and the good of British ceramicists, from Bernard Leach to Ruth King, with special focus on the pioneering studio potter Gordon Baldwin, who passed away in May 2025.
“It’s 2026! God knows what fresh horrors and pleasures this year has in store for us all!” was how I opened Not London last month, and boy oh boy have the horrors been aplenty. Remember when I used to get to open this column with a cheeky comment on how London is shit?
January has certainly been bleak in the predictable dark-and-wet-and-cold way that happens every single year and yet always manages to take us by surprise. This year has felt undoubtedly bleaker.
But perhaps we can take our disgust and disappointment and use it to fuel our commitments to our communities and our rights to free expression. Spending your time and your money in a regional arts centre is a great way to do that. So, from Cornwall to Cardiff via two of the Yorkshires, here is my list of must-see exhibitions outside of London this February, with female artists and pioneering craftmakers in the spotlight.
Hopefully we will be able to resume with our usual schedule of shitting on London in the introduction soon. Fingers crossed.
Listen, I’m going to make a tenuous comparison here because I’m having caffeine withdrawal and I am *this close* to drinking some old Bovril at the back of the cupboard, which I’m sure my brain can be tricked into thinking it's caffeinated by the fact that it is both hot and brown. There is something oddly beautiful about the neon debris that glitches across old TV footage, and I was surprised to see similar, lurid sparks when I watched a video of someone looking at human ashes under a microscope. Someone less tired would now connect the two and write something astute about the fragmentation of our lives in the context of digitalisation. It would be incredibly deep. Fortunately, Paul Lemmon’s show, opening imminently at Coventry’s Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, uses corrupted YouTube footage as the source material for his large-scale oil paintings, which speak to the beautiful tension between our lives online and off. The dialogue between digital and analogue imagery in his work is incredibly satisfying and will be well worth the trip.
It has been well over 100 years since Birmingham was thought of as the “Workshop of the World” or the “City of a Thousand Trades”. Thanks to the systematic closure of British manufacturing, it can feel like the country laid down its tools a long time ago. But ‘Made in the Middle’ at the Midlands Arts Centre is here to prove that the region’s urge to create, and its craftspeople’s skill, has gone nowhere. The exhibition showcases contemporary crafts, from ceramics to metalwork, as well as textiles, jewellery and sculptures, made by 37 artists from the Midlands, aged between 22 and 82. It was curated by Craftspace, a Birmingham-based charity dedicated to the promotion of contemporary craft – a vital mission if you care about nice things ever being made again.
Bodmin, Cornwall - FLAMM - opening 28 February until 03 March
I want to go to FLAMM, but I can’t go, so I’m writing about it here will have to do. Please bear with me while I get “I didn’t go to FLAMM and all I got was this lousy article” t-shirts into production. FLAMM is a yearly contemporary arts festival in Cornwall, designed to showcase and celebrate the wealth of talented artists and craftspeople working in the South West. The region has been a haven for artists since the Victorian era, when (wealthy) creatives could use the newly-built trainlines to find out that Cornwall is significantly nicer than literally anywhere else in the country. The festival sets up shop in a different Cornish town each year, and now it’s Bodmin’s turn, with major installation commissions from five artists, heavy on ghost stories, automata, and jackdaws.
The nighttime urban scenes of Victorian cities for which John Atkinson Grimshaw is best known are beautiful. I’ll admit it’s a shame that I automatically think a murder is about to happen in them at any moment, because that’s basically all that happens at night in Victorian cities in television shows. But aside from the impending sense of peril - they’re beautiful. Leeds Art Gallery has amassed a huge collection of ‘Nocturnes’ by their home-grown hero, and ‘Don’t Let’s Ask for the Moon’ brings them all together. Included in the display is the gallery’s latest Grimshaw acquisition, Reflections on the Aire – on strike, believed to be one of the first paintings depicting the fallout of industrial action. So let this exhibition also be a reminder to join a union. Sadly, there’s not a union for whatever this is that I’m calling a career.
Watts Gallery, Surrey - Women of Influence: The Pattle Sisters - until 04 May
The Pattle Sisters had it all: they were hot, rich, and highly networked. May 2026 bring such blessings to us all! A lot of credit is given to artists for changing the course of culture, but artists would be nowhere without the wealthy patrons who enabled them to do their thing (conveniently, though, throughout history, most artists have also happened to be independently loaded). In Victorian England, there may have been none so influential as the seven (seven!?) Pattle Sisters. Included among them were a pioneering photographer (Julia), the grandmother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (Maria - ‘Mia’), and the salon hostess whose gatherings supported huge artistic, political, and scientific developments (Sara). That the exhibition celebrating the sisters is being held at Watts Gallery is wonderfully apt, due to Sara’s influence on the life of G.F. Watts.
Turner Contemporary, Kent - Bridget Riley: Learning to See - until 04 May
I want to enjoy Bridget Riley’s work more than I do, because I’m not sure that I totally *get* it (although I do hold her in the highest esteem as a pioneer), but I think a visit to ‘Learning to See’ at Turner Contemporary would sort me right out. Working closely with Riley herself - sorry, Bridget, I didn’t mean what I said earlier - the exhibition spans the entirety of her six-decade career, and showcases preparatory works on paper which have typically been left out of the spotlight. The backdrop of the Margate coastline also promises to be a nice link to Riley’s upbringing on the Cornish coast.
The Box, Devon - Beryl Cook: Pride and Joy - until 31 May
If I were going to be transformed into a figure in a painting - at random - but could choose the artist, I’d choose Beryl Cook. The odds would be very high with Cook that you’d end up as someone having the time of their life: on a girls’ night out, having a chippie tea, winning the bingo, drinking tea on the lawn in the buff. ‘Pride and Joy’ at The Box is the most extensive exhibition of Cook’s works to date, displaying more than 80 of her paintings that truly capture the joy of the everyday – even during times of major historic change. Cook’s biographies often highlight how she didn’t produce her first painting until her thirties, something regularly pointed out about ‘older’ artists to encourage aspiring creatives that “it’s never too late”. This is less and less reassuring to me as my own thirties loom ever closer. I saw a video the other day urging people that “25 is not too old” to start your dreams. Gulp.
National Museum Cardiff, Glamorgan - Gwen John: Strange Beauties - opening 07 February until 28 June
I love Gwen John because for years she was described as the “overlooked sister of her much more famous brother, Augustus John”, and now she is arguably the more celebrated sibling. You’ve got to play the long game. Celebrating her 150th birthday this year, there are several Gwen John exhibitions scheduled around the country (you only turn 150 once!) but the place to see her work, surely, is in her native Wales. Amgueddfa Cymru is bringing together rarely-seen works by John from its collections, along with major loans, to celebrate the birthday girl in the first major collection of her work in the country in more than four decades.
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridgeshire - War Craft - until 23 August
The last thing we want to think about right now is war. Even “craft” makes some people nervous. But perhaps these uncertain times are the perfect moment to visit the Fitzwilliam Museum’s new display of prints, engraved coins, and personal items, showcasing the beauty that has come out of conflicts over the centuries and across continents. Sharing stories of soldiers, civilians, and POWs, the museum displays these objects not to remind us of an inherent human will to violence, but to create. Rutger Bregman’s ‘Humankind’ might be a good read ahead of your visit to the Fitzwilliam, to help remind you that humans aren’t hardwired to be terrible bastards, and that moments of real tenderness can emerge in horror.
York Art Gallery, North Yorkshire - Not a Pot - ongoing
I’m a sucker for a “what it says on the tin” exhibition title, and York Art Gallery’s ‘Not a Pot’ is just that. The gallery’s Centre of Ceramic Art has undergone a recent redisplay, and the curatorial team have decided that pots have hogged the limelight long enough. Be gone, pots! And make way for… not pots! The reshuffle includes works by the great and the good of British ceramicists, from Bernard Leach to Ruth King, with special focus on the pioneering studio potter Gordon Baldwin, who passed away in May 2025.
“It’s 2026! God knows what fresh horrors and pleasures this year has in store for us all!” was how I opened Not London last month, and boy oh boy have the horrors been aplenty. Remember when I used to get to open this column with a cheeky comment on how London is shit?
January has certainly been bleak in the predictable dark-and-wet-and-cold way that happens every single year and yet always manages to take us by surprise. This year has felt undoubtedly bleaker.
But perhaps we can take our disgust and disappointment and use it to fuel our commitments to our communities and our rights to free expression. Spending your time and your money in a regional arts centre is a great way to do that. So, from Cornwall to Cardiff via two of the Yorkshires, here is my list of must-see exhibitions outside of London this February, with female artists and pioneering craftmakers in the spotlight.
Hopefully we will be able to resume with our usual schedule of shitting on London in the introduction soon. Fingers crossed.
Listen, I’m going to make a tenuous comparison here because I’m having caffeine withdrawal and I am *this close* to drinking some old Bovril at the back of the cupboard, which I’m sure my brain can be tricked into thinking it's caffeinated by the fact that it is both hot and brown. There is something oddly beautiful about the neon debris that glitches across old TV footage, and I was surprised to see similar, lurid sparks when I watched a video of someone looking at human ashes under a microscope. Someone less tired would now connect the two and write something astute about the fragmentation of our lives in the context of digitalisation. It would be incredibly deep. Fortunately, Paul Lemmon’s show, opening imminently at Coventry’s Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, uses corrupted YouTube footage as the source material for his large-scale oil paintings, which speak to the beautiful tension between our lives online and off. The dialogue between digital and analogue imagery in his work is incredibly satisfying and will be well worth the trip.
It has been well over 100 years since Birmingham was thought of as the “Workshop of the World” or the “City of a Thousand Trades”. Thanks to the systematic closure of British manufacturing, it can feel like the country laid down its tools a long time ago. But ‘Made in the Middle’ at the Midlands Arts Centre is here to prove that the region’s urge to create, and its craftspeople’s skill, has gone nowhere. The exhibition showcases contemporary crafts, from ceramics to metalwork, as well as textiles, jewellery and sculptures, made by 37 artists from the Midlands, aged between 22 and 82. It was curated by Craftspace, a Birmingham-based charity dedicated to the promotion of contemporary craft – a vital mission if you care about nice things ever being made again.
Bodmin, Cornwall - FLAMM - opening 28 February until 03 March
I want to go to FLAMM, but I can’t go, so I’m writing about it here will have to do. Please bear with me while I get “I didn’t go to FLAMM and all I got was this lousy article” t-shirts into production. FLAMM is a yearly contemporary arts festival in Cornwall, designed to showcase and celebrate the wealth of talented artists and craftspeople working in the South West. The region has been a haven for artists since the Victorian era, when (wealthy) creatives could use the newly-built trainlines to find out that Cornwall is significantly nicer than literally anywhere else in the country. The festival sets up shop in a different Cornish town each year, and now it’s Bodmin’s turn, with major installation commissions from five artists, heavy on ghost stories, automata, and jackdaws.
The nighttime urban scenes of Victorian cities for which John Atkinson Grimshaw is best known are beautiful. I’ll admit it’s a shame that I automatically think a murder is about to happen in them at any moment, because that’s basically all that happens at night in Victorian cities in television shows. But aside from the impending sense of peril - they’re beautiful. Leeds Art Gallery has amassed a huge collection of ‘Nocturnes’ by their home-grown hero, and ‘Don’t Let’s Ask for the Moon’ brings them all together. Included in the display is the gallery’s latest Grimshaw acquisition, Reflections on the Aire – on strike, believed to be one of the first paintings depicting the fallout of industrial action. So let this exhibition also be a reminder to join a union. Sadly, there’s not a union for whatever this is that I’m calling a career.
Watts Gallery, Surrey - Women of Influence: The Pattle Sisters - until 04 May
The Pattle Sisters had it all: they were hot, rich, and highly networked. May 2026 bring such blessings to us all! A lot of credit is given to artists for changing the course of culture, but artists would be nowhere without the wealthy patrons who enabled them to do their thing (conveniently, though, throughout history, most artists have also happened to be independently loaded). In Victorian England, there may have been none so influential as the seven (seven!?) Pattle Sisters. Included among them were a pioneering photographer (Julia), the grandmother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (Maria - ‘Mia’), and the salon hostess whose gatherings supported huge artistic, political, and scientific developments (Sara). That the exhibition celebrating the sisters is being held at Watts Gallery is wonderfully apt, due to Sara’s influence on the life of G.F. Watts.
Turner Contemporary, Kent - Bridget Riley: Learning to See - until 04 May
I want to enjoy Bridget Riley’s work more than I do, because I’m not sure that I totally *get* it (although I do hold her in the highest esteem as a pioneer), but I think a visit to ‘Learning to See’ at Turner Contemporary would sort me right out. Working closely with Riley herself - sorry, Bridget, I didn’t mean what I said earlier - the exhibition spans the entirety of her six-decade career, and showcases preparatory works on paper which have typically been left out of the spotlight. The backdrop of the Margate coastline also promises to be a nice link to Riley’s upbringing on the Cornish coast.
The Box, Devon - Beryl Cook: Pride and Joy - until 31 May
If I were going to be transformed into a figure in a painting - at random - but could choose the artist, I’d choose Beryl Cook. The odds would be very high with Cook that you’d end up as someone having the time of their life: on a girls’ night out, having a chippie tea, winning the bingo, drinking tea on the lawn in the buff. ‘Pride and Joy’ at The Box is the most extensive exhibition of Cook’s works to date, displaying more than 80 of her paintings that truly capture the joy of the everyday – even during times of major historic change. Cook’s biographies often highlight how she didn’t produce her first painting until her thirties, something regularly pointed out about ‘older’ artists to encourage aspiring creatives that “it’s never too late”. This is less and less reassuring to me as my own thirties loom ever closer. I saw a video the other day urging people that “25 is not too old” to start your dreams. Gulp.
National Museum Cardiff, Glamorgan - Gwen John: Strange Beauties - opening 07 February until 28 June
I love Gwen John because for years she was described as the “overlooked sister of her much more famous brother, Augustus John”, and now she is arguably the more celebrated sibling. You’ve got to play the long game. Celebrating her 150th birthday this year, there are several Gwen John exhibitions scheduled around the country (you only turn 150 once!) but the place to see her work, surely, is in her native Wales. Amgueddfa Cymru is bringing together rarely-seen works by John from its collections, along with major loans, to celebrate the birthday girl in the first major collection of her work in the country in more than four decades.
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridgeshire - War Craft - until 23 August
The last thing we want to think about right now is war. Even “craft” makes some people nervous. But perhaps these uncertain times are the perfect moment to visit the Fitzwilliam Museum’s new display of prints, engraved coins, and personal items, showcasing the beauty that has come out of conflicts over the centuries and across continents. Sharing stories of soldiers, civilians, and POWs, the museum displays these objects not to remind us of an inherent human will to violence, but to create. Rutger Bregman’s ‘Humankind’ might be a good read ahead of your visit to the Fitzwilliam, to help remind you that humans aren’t hardwired to be terrible bastards, and that moments of real tenderness can emerge in horror.
York Art Gallery, North Yorkshire - Not a Pot - ongoing
I’m a sucker for a “what it says on the tin” exhibition title, and York Art Gallery’s ‘Not a Pot’ is just that. The gallery’s Centre of Ceramic Art has undergone a recent redisplay, and the curatorial team have decided that pots have hogged the limelight long enough. Be gone, pots! And make way for… not pots! The reshuffle includes works by the great and the good of British ceramicists, from Bernard Leach to Ruth King, with special focus on the pioneering studio potter Gordon Baldwin, who passed away in May 2025.
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