Spent a weekend at my friend A’s recently, and as we all craved an autumnal walk, out we went for a 2hr walk in Thorndon Country Park in Essex, a county to the east of London. What a privilege to be able to be in nature, taking in the beautiful colours of autumn, with the bestest of friends. It doesn’t take much to make me happy - and bringing hot tea in a flask is just icing on the cake.
Me and D, last Saturday, enjoying a quick half pint after lunch, in a snug to ourselves, and rather good light. Noice.
It feels like it’s been a while since there’s been an awe-inspiring installation in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. In fact, maybe it’s been years or maybe even a decade. Well, El Anatsui’s Behind the Red Moon is a definite must-see. In fact, I’d like to go back on a sunny day to see how different it might look - can it glimmer even more than this? I hope you can sense the scale of these, as they’re absolutely huge. I’ve seen Anatsui’s work before, but not on this scale. To explain what these are made out of, I’ve copied and pasted this from his website: Anatsui is well-known for large scale sculptures composed of thousands of folded and crumpled pieces of aluminium bottle caps sourced from local alcohol recycling stations and bound together with copper wire. These intricate works, which can grow to be massive in scale, are luminous and weighty, meticulously fabricated yet malleable. He leaves the installations open and encourages the works to take new forms every time they are installed. Mind blowing. It’s on until April 14th 2024, so if you like what you see and you happen to be in town before then, well you know the drill. Go.
I’ve had this month’s theme in my head for years. I’ve noticed the space between buildings, in particular shops, as being a kind of strange no man’s land of ugliness, a space of unsightly cables and sometimes traces of what was before. I took all of these on a walk at the beginning of October, on my way to the shops in my neighbourhood where I had some errands to run. Turns out that was lucky, as I ended up being ill and housebound for three weeks and so couldn’t go out looking for more. It’s not as pretty a theme as red dresses, but it made me see things I’ve never seen before, like all the stickers for shutters or shutter repairs. Who knew? I also can’t believe the lazy dog owner in the third pic, who rather than find a bin, tucked a bag of dog poo behind the pipes on the wall. I shall keep paying attention to these in-between spaces, and also see what they look like in different countries. This is the sort of weirdness that I find interesting 😂