Happy Birthday to You
Happy Birthday to You
Happy Birthday ‘Not London’
Happy Birthday to You
One whole year of slagging off the capital! Long live ‘Not London’ - truly my favourite thing to write, so thank you to anyone who’s given it a read.
Now, before we cut the cake and do the piñata - here are my recommendations for must-see exhibitions outside of London this May, covering everything from prints to plates via ramblings about the Olympics, Indiana Jones, and Tumblr.
The Wilson, Gloucestershire - Crafted By Hand: Pattern in the Arts and Crafts Movement - until June
I recently came across two things: @weeping1930shouses, documenting 1930s interwar homes that have been made over into streamlined modern atrocities, and the concept of “the death of detail”, which laments that we basically don’t make anything beautiful for the sake of it any more because minimalism has ornamentalism in a headlock while it flushes its head down the toilet like a high school jock. ‘Crafted by Hand’ at The Wilson sounds like the perfect remedy for millennial-beige-inspired despair, celebrating the designs of the 1880s Arts and Crafts Movement. Drawing their inspiration from the patterns and textures found in nature, and vehemently against machine-made design for fear that it was rotting our souls, now feels like the perfect time to revisit this movement, what with all the AI slop and ecological collapse going on.
God, the birthday edition of Not London has got off to a cheery start…
Hub, Lincolnshire - I only dance, I wish we could sing - until 05 July
Craft history meets contemporary craftsmanship in Raisa Kabir’s solo exhibition in Sleaford, where the interdisciplinary artist and weaver draws inspiration from Lincolnshire’s textile industry (Boston port being Medieval England’s primary wool exporter) as well as from the Asian textile traditions which directly informed the industry in the West. Combining textiles, video and sound pieces, and performance, Kabir examines changing ideas of labour and production across borders. The artist has also drawn on the nearby River Slea - once full of trout, now mostly Japanese Knotweed - for inspiration, creating a new set of artworks made in the shape of coracles - basket-like one-seater boats used in Britain since ancient times.
The Lightbox, Surrey - Howard Hodgkin: In a Public Garden - until 12 July
When was the last time things were good? I was discussing this with friends at the pub, and 2016 was tossed around as a good bet until we remembered two pretty major electoral cock-ups. Personally, I reckon 2012 was a good one, because I was 14 so had 0 responsibilities, there were two new Arctic Monkeys singles, and I think the Olympics gave us all a nice boost. One iconic image to come from that blissful summer was Howard Hodgkin’s Swimming, one of 12 official posters produced for the games. Now more than forty of Hodgkin’s prints, including Swimming, are on display in Woking, spanning five decades of the artist’s career, who is best known for his gestural (although meticulously planned) swoops of colour.
Arts Collective, Northamptonshire - Rose Finn-Kelcey: House Rules - until 01 August
I loved what was once ‘NN Contemporary’, and its long-awaited reopening as ‘Arts Collective’ at 24 Guildhall Road is finally here! The team kindly gave me some volunteer experience when I was straight out of university and living in my parents’ basement, and I mostly remember not being very good at painting the walls in between exhibitions. The six-year renovation (a sort of sequel to the reopening of Northampton Museum and Art Gallery, where I briefly catalogued some historic shoes during the basement years) is a huge leap forward for culture in Northampton, and I am so excited to see the new space. They’re launching this new era with an exhibition of Northampton-born artist Rose Finn-Kelcey, whose multimedia practice examined the impact of architecture on power structures and faith - an apt show for popping the cherry of the new Arts Collective building, a restored 1930s town hall annexe (which certainly won’t end up on @weeping1930shouses).
QUAD, Derbyshire - A Gentle Man (Part II) (1975 - 2029) - until 02 August
I was up in Derby last month for the first time and it’s properly lovely (recommendations: upstairs in the Museum of Making where they’ve basically got everything ever made in Derbyshire on display, Department Store & Co who sell a lot of lovely things and run print workshops, and The Spice Lounge who gave me the reddest Chicken Tikka Masala I’ve ever seen), and on my tour I stopped briefly in QUAD, the city’s arts house and cinema. ‘A Gentle Man’ is a touring exhibition by sculptor and photographer Becky Beasley that is so aesthetically gorgeous that if you filmed it in black-and-white, it would basically be a Lana Del Rey music video. The star of the show, for me, is Beasley’s set of three rotating pink curtains, each hung on rails in the shape of the letters H S and P, standing for “Highly Sensitive Person”, which I think I would like installed in my house. It’s a show all about identity, with nature references and linoleum galore.
Compton Verney, Warwickshire - Troublemakers and Prophets - until 31 August
“It’s never too late for you to chase your dreams and change your life!” is something usually said patronisingly by 25-year-old influencers who go on to list people who got their big break when they were “old” (over 29). But the artist Elizabeth Allen might be a good example of how, if you dedicate yourself to making good work, recognition will eventually find you. ‘Discovered’ in her 80s while living in a remote hut in Bromley, she had spent a lifetime creating brilliant sewn artworks, many of which have a dark prophetic quality to them, others deeply funny, some both. The exhibition includes the first-ever public display of the ‘Autobirragraphy’, her fascinating textile autobiography. In this exhibition, Allen - known as ‘Queen’ in her lifetime - is displayed alongside 15 other artists who had their own unique interpretation of living. So, take this as your sign to keep making what you’re making, even if no one is paying attention now. And maybe consider a stint in the woods…
Watts Gallery, Surrey - Women of ‘Our Time’ - until 31 August
In 1932, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant (leading figures in the Bloomsbury Group of creative poshos who made lovely things) were commissioned to create the Famous Women Dinner Service for Kenneth Clark, a set of 50 plates decorated with portraits of notable ladies (plus one of Grant himself for diversity purposes), ranging from Jane Austen and Cleopatra to Greta Garbo and Pocahontas. 94 years later, nine artists who are serving prisoners in Woking’s HMP Send have reimagined the dinner service, selecting a new guestlist of figures for a hypothetical dinner party with Mary Watts, the founder of Watts Gallery, along with her husband Frederick. And the lineup looks cracking. Can you imagine asking Lubaina Himid to pass you the water? or hoping you wouldn’t be sat next to Dorothy Hodgkin because you don’t want to have to hear AGAIN about how she’s the only British woman to get a Nobel Prize? The plates are displayed in Limnerslease, the home of the Watts’, and are the result of weekly art workshops which provide art therapy to female inmates.
Russell-Cotes Museum, Dorset - Flower Fairies™: Enchantment by the Sea - until 04 October
I know little about Flower Fairies™ (but I love that we have to add ™ because it makes it sound the fairies are a litigious corporate mafia) although I do know that they have been a childhood staple for generations since Flower Fairies of the Spring was written by Cicely Mary Barker in 1923 because the experts are always very excited to find early editions of the books on Antiques Road Trip. The girlhood fairy-phase pretty much passed me by entirely because I was mostly pretending to be Indiana Jones riding up countryside lanes on my scooter (in what was presumably Lucasfilms’ least commercially successful addition to the original trilogy). This exhibition celebrates the enchanting world of Barker’s fairies, which she illustrated with incredibly accomplished botanical drawings. And it couldn’t really be in a more beautiful setting, at Russell-Cotes, the former home of the hotelier and art collector Sir Merton Russell-Cotes, which looks out onto the Bournemouth coast and the Dorset landscape, which Barker visited on several occasions.
Charleston in Firle, East Sussex - Guerrilla Girls - until 06 September
I have a soft spot for the Guerrilla Girls because when I was about 14, having seen their Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into the Met. Museum poster on Sad Girl Tumblr but not grasping that they’re a massive international phenomenon, I emailed them to see if they would be interested in coming to my rural Northamptonshire school to give a talk about sexism. And they came! No, obviously they didn’t, but can you imagine? Their latest UK exhibition is being held in probably my favourite arts venue, the gallery of Charleston Farmhouse, where the Bloomsbury Group (who made those plates, remember?) were getting off with each other and painting the ceilings between the 1910s and 1970s. The Guerrilla Girls’ posters will act as a fabulous contrast to the modernist designs across the path in the main house, and it’s the perfect season to enjoy Charleston.
Mining Art Gallery, County Durham - Tom McGuiness: Out of the Darkness - until December
Tom McGuiness was a fascinating man, a ‘Bevan Boy’ - conscripted to work in the coal mines during the 1940s to boost coal production - when he was just 18, before studying at Darlington School of Art. He was uniquely placed to create work about the mining industries, working as a coal miner for just short of 40 years. Marking the artist’s 100th birthday, the exhibition is being held aptly at Bishop Auckland’s Mining Art Gallery, showing McGuinness’ peerless ability to capture the mining industry and the perspectives of those working in it. Now also feels like an important moment to connect with artefacts of our industrial past, to remind us to fight for the preservation of working communities.
