by JILL SPALDING

Conceived as a cloud, perceived as a spaceship, this $1bn- (£747m) plus galaxy funded by Star Wars has been pulling in record attendance. Intended as a crowd pleaser, it delivers – as Hollywood would say – big-time. 

Beloved R2-D2, conceived when robots were endearing, greets you at the entry. Cheerful attendants guide you to tubular, no-pushbutton glass lifts (the acrophobic can opt for an enclosed one) controlled by their iPads. All shoot up to the circular main-event fourth-floor galleries of themed alcoves titled like magazines – Family, Motherhood, Romance, Adventure, Work, Play, School, Comics, Community, and so on – that line up works drawn largely from George Lucas’s extensive collection, and build, finally!, to the stunning raison d’etre Cinema Gallery that unfolds, panel by painting by diorama by object, the famed director’s fabled galaxy. Ready for closeups that open to selfies are lifelike replicas of Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia Organa, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda and Chewbacca.

Narrowing in on the building and it’s intention, the fantastical structure by MAD founder Ma Yansong shares his architectural firm’s aesthetic, as laid out in the Architecture gallery and which manifests here as a grass-ringed, beam-me-up oculus rising from space-age arcades and brightly lit walkways. Easy on viewers is the prevalence of wood floors and the refreshing stop-start rhythm occasioned by interspersing long walls of art with sixone-artist galleries. Gladdening, the one given Norman Rockwell,which for ever raises his work to the level of fine art.

Much else appeals; the 13-acrecampus includes gardens featuring an amphitheatre, a waterfall, Yodaflanking a fountain and plenty of seating, and under the watchful eye of the oculus allcan access the entry-free gardens and courtyard. 

Focusing in on the art, welcome, the nod to our growing Latino community – albeit inconsistent – of bilingual captions. Impressive, the traditional works, though it’s not evident what connects them. The goal of an arching narrative gathers such disparate luminaries as Lucas Cranach the Elder, Artemisia Gentileschi, John Singer Sargent, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Vincent van Gogh and (in yetanother self-portrait) Frida Kahlo. 

More germane are the modern American masters, ranging from Howard Pyle to Alice Neel. Putting paid to the western cannon are strong showings ofRomare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence; a superb George Bellows; Robert Colescott’s cause celebre George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware (1975) and several of Kadir Nelson’s subtly revised histories. 

The single-artist galleries confirm the mastery of Maxfield Parrish’s neoclassical dreamworlds, the swashbucklers illustrated by NC Wyeth and sci-fi tales by Frank Frazetta that livened many a boyhood. The one dedicated to Jessie Willcox Smith raises her to the level of Mary Cassatt (also shown here) and the one given Thomas Hart Benton’s powerfully subversive depictions of American life will stop you in your tracks.

Among the few nods to music is the famed acrylic painting Quintet (c1989), by the great Black artist Ernie Barnes. Photography (the traditional works oddly confined to one gallery) is represented somewhat randomly by such as Dorothea Lange, Henri Cartier-Bresson and the French photographer and street artist JR. More extensive is the space given to nostalgia. There are charming nods to Winnie-the-Pooh, Peter Rabbit and the idealised, thankfully dated, blond/blue-eyed sweetness of an untroubled childhood that gentled many a nursery wall. Highlighted, too, are Hilary Knight’s cherished Eloise, Charles Schulz’s timeless Peanuts, and the primal worlds conjured by Maurice Sendak. Unexpected omissions include such pop-culture phenomenons as The Katzenjammer Kids and Dr Seuss’s whacky tales. Oddly, too, the marking legacy of the Wizard of Oz is relegated to the movie costume of the Cowardly Lion. There is, however, a wall-long tribute to manga and Pokémon Trading Cards, starring Naoyo Kimura’s famed Pikachu and Takashi Murakami’s pop-culture fibreglass sculpture Miss Ko2.

That so few paused to view even these may be that the promise of the Galactic Empire is held out until the end. Although totalling only 7% of what’s showing, so immersive are its backdrops and so beloved its avatars as to lessen the impact of the works building up to them. Even the jaded will succumb to what unfolds in this inaugural Star Wars in Motion exhibit as the ultimate story. 

Find here the Starship’s landing platform, the original land and transit vehicles and, rendered life-size, the principal characters in their original costumes. Out came the phones to share and record. The boys clustered around Luke’s landspeeder, the girls around Princess Leia. Even parents herding small children paused for selfies and those of an age to have attended the premieres seemed lost in reverie.

Those opting for more regrouped in the fairytale multilevel library stocked with shiny new picture books before finding their way to the southern wing for the lift to the fifth floor’s long-line cafe, pricey rooftop Skywalker Grill, powerful activist murals by Diego Rivera and Judith Baca, and two walls of Banksys flourished with an original stencil.

What to make of it all? I was not alone in thinking the layout confusing, the lift system tricky, and access lines too long. The larger question is whether this disparate assemblage constitutes a museum as heretofore understood – an institution that conserves, interprets, educates and collects in depth. Formed, rather, as a personal collection, intended to delight not instruct, this seemingly haphazard array presents more as an entertaining display – a richly pictured kaleidoscope of times past and present – thereby joining the new idea, most strongly suggested by Dataland, of a museum as a skilfully curated “experience”. 

Although Lucas has assembled some compelling material, that Star Wars is the expected attraction adds “vanity” to “museum”. What in the latter would constitute classical main-event masterworks present here as irrelevant lead-ins to the promised trans-galactic fantasy. More notably prioritising enchantment over enlightenment, none of the galleries, although thoughtfully appointed, offers a wall text detailing what is exhibited, and the captions reveal only the artist’s name and date.

Unclear, too, the titular umbrella of “narrative art” that joins painted canvas to comics, videos and posters but omits ceramics and sculpture. Storytelling is an ancient art form, and mid-19th-century modernist efforts to dissociate narrative (lowbrow) from art (fine) have been put to rest by the mastery of such as Kerry James Marshall. But that much of what is shown here is reproduced (the Cave of Altamira and the Sistine Chapel) or on loan (Baca’s Great Wall of Los Angeles), why then no ancient Greek vases, which were all about narrative? And what of sculpture – here represented only by life-size galactic creatures, anime’s paper mache Shotaro Kaneda, a towering wooden KAWS signature Companion character, haphazard reproductions of the Louvre’s famed Mesopotamian eighth-century BC Human-Headed Winged Bulls from the Palace of Sargon II and a 16th-century Aztec calendar stone? Doesn’t historical narrative animate Renaissance marbles, such 19th-century marvels as a Antoine-Louise Barye animalier bronze and the American neo-classicist Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave? Or Elizabeth Catlett’s 1956 Mother and Child, and the richly sculpted worlds of Nancy and Edward Kienholz and Charles Ray? The thought lingers that the curation was directed by the taste and preferences of Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, and that much of the work here is included or excluded because they do or don’t own it.

Even the choice of loans baffles. Many a master painting tells a story, so why, for example, settle on Lucas Cranach the Elder’s disturbing The Judgment of Solomon (from the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin) that depicts two women, a dead infant at their feet, each claiming to be the mother of a living one?

My final reservation, as with Dataland and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Geffen Galleries, is the cost. Although free on certain days to locals and to all under 17, the $25 ticket price per adult, or $140 annual membership, and $20 parking still feel excessive. Happily though, between its amphitheatre, extensive library and two movie theatres, a timed visit could extend to a day. And it’s but a short walk to the free-entry California African American Museum and Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center, the art and Jurassic skeleton furbishing the Natural History Museum, and an affordable Metro ride home.    

Also of note now is the spotlight on ceramics. Exhibited as craft long after Los Angeles had become a major centre of the studio ceramics movement, work in clay came into its own here about 20 years ago and has never since danced around the perimeter of fine art. Its current surge, therefore, is not a moment but a crowning. 

One would be hard pressed this season to visit a gallery or museum that has not recently profiled clay – raw, fired, glazed, painted, moulded, pieced, assembled or monumentalised. At Marc Selwyn, the vitreous, shamanic totems wrought by the former marine and Black Panther Akinsanya Kambon, and at David Zwirner the subversively mock-cartoon deities by the going-strong 97-year old artist Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, and a crowd-pleasing high-tea tableau by ceramist Sonia Boyajian comprising a table laden with sparkly vessels and faux-foods (think hot dogs, guacamole, a fruit bowl and cake) fashioned from a tour de force mix of terracotta, earthenware, stoneware and porcelain.    

On view now, at Carpenters Workshop Gallery until 10 October, Roger Herman’s massive glazed pots and tables; at Craft Contemporary until 25 October, the activist adobe architect, Rafa Esparza’s unsettling 20ft-long adobe brick walkway Vuela Vuela (2021), depicting a fallen (gunned down?) man from the queer community. Not to be missed, the great Tony Marsh. Find his 1990’s clay forms and astounding 2022 multiple fired Neo-Crucible at In These Times: Recent Acquisitions at MOCA, until 3 January. And – a curiosity – at the Wönzimer gallery until 9 October, Earth Elements: Paint and Fire pairs the paintings and pottery of self-taught ceramicists to scuttle set ideas of art versus craft. Although each work details a different transition to shaped structure, they share the unbridled exhilaration of the leap to a new medium. Not all are convincing in execution or intention, but there is much to glean from their efforts. Exceptions in that they pivoted from clay to canvas, Galia Linn’s paintings succeed as narrative wall vessels and Cybele Rowe’s handling of flatness does suggest volume. Given the overall eccentricity, “fine” art may be a reach, but you will leave with a wider understanding of clay’s possibilities. 

Purists are eagerly awaiting The Eternal Quality of Aesthetic Joy: Laura Andreson and Her Legacy, at Craft in America (10 October – 9 January 2027), to revisit the refinement of the shimmering bowls and vases wrought by this widely influential founder of the 1930s UCLA Ceramics programme.

Enthralling us now, the pioneering achievement of Doyle Lane, the master ceramist well-known to his community but not to the wider world, that has finally been given its due in this first major museum retrospective, Doyle Lane: Master of Clay, at the Huntington Museum in San Marino until 1 March. A celebration of sorts, this exhibition reconsiders Lane’s importance in the history of California modernism, confirms his belief that ceramics share equal standing with painting and sculpture, and places him at the centre of a circle of noted Black artists such as Charles White, John Outerbridge, and Betye Saar.

Would there were a grander word than “mastery” for Lane’s creativity and deep understanding of his materials. Bubbled, mottled, stippled, dimpled, blistered, incised,his chemically volatile glazes riff on tapestry, quilting, netting, marquetry, hieroglyphs and mahjong tiles. And such was Doyle’s versatility that no form eluded him. Fashioned into more than 100 murals (of which the museum owns a famous one) and such disparate objects as sgraffito-styled bowls, lamps, jars, masks, ashtrays and fish, clay servedboth as a storyboard and, as so fully on show here, this seminalartist’s autobiography.

Wondrous, too, Lane’s command of obdurate hues – with red the most intractable – that renders clay into colour-field paintings. Prodigious, the trompe l’oeil assemblages marrying found wood and ceramic. Captivating, the carefully worked beads he hawked around for $1 to sustain him through lean times. Unexpectedly moving, the signature single-stem wildflower “weed pots” – tiny, variously glazed and textured vessels that present here as talismans.

Speaking to reach are elements of the famed sculptural fish fountain that Lane crafted in 1964 for a market in Pasadena and, in the courtyard, the Huntington’s famed 17ft x 8ft mural composed of nearly 5,000 rainbow-red tiles.

by TOM DENMAN

Art is often thought of as bearing the signature of its maker, even when the artist has barely touched the artwork. To view art in this way is an impulse we cannot really shift. Nonetheless, we might still want to question whether such a signature is as individualistic as it is conceived to be. Or whether it is, in fact, much like subjectivity itself, born of a person’s ever-fluctuating relation to the world. No one is an island.

This blurring of the self is felt in the layered, shredded and sutured paintings and collages of the Chilean artist Francisca Aninat. Fundamental to them is the thread, a tactile stand-in for communication, connection and finding one’s way, that evokes exposed nerve endings, a raw encounter between the artwork – and whoever, if anyone, is represented in it – and us. Her work often stems from freewheeling, vulnerable conversations; for the past couple of years, for instance, she has been conducting interviews with patients at Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge. Rather than depict or illustrate these, she allows recurring images and words – in the conversation, then in her mind – to fuel an intuitive search for playful, oblique, open-ended forms that conjure the psychic complexity of living in a relational world.

I met Aninat in a cafe near her north London studio to discuss her current exhibition, Four Steps and a Looking Glass, at 92 Webster Road, a single-room gallery in south-east London, run by curator Cecilia Vilela in collaboration with the artist Ron Henocq. This small, trapezoid, windowless box of a space could be the antechamber of another dimension – an appropriate setting for Aninat’s play of asymmetry and surprise. In it, she has installed a large freestanding piece of translucent orange fabric, stretched on a solid frame, that suggests a crossing from one state, realm or subjectivity to another. Another work is a metal ladderlike object, one-sided, its “rungs” warped on a diagonal slant as if to fit the rules of this limbic zone. Spreading from one corner are dusky monochrome photographs, some depicting leaves, others presenting a mysterious hand with matches in its palm. The walls are otherwise scattered with a constellation of curious, delicately charged objects: tiny collages of layered fabric, pins and plaster, a conch-like formation of tea-dyed envelopes, a protrusion of matches bound like a torch.

Although overused in descriptions of any art that doesn’t declare a clearcut meaning, here the word poetic is warranted not only because Aninat is an excellent poet in her own right but because, as an artist, she draws inspiration from the Chilean tradition of visual poetry that blossomed in the second half of the 20th century. Her sensitivity to time and rhythm and intelligent juxtapositions endow her work with a spatial and material lyricism, affording us a moment to feel the world without inscribing it with fixed values or meaning. Winding through all of this is the tender threshold of self and other. Aninat and I began our conversation by talking about what it means to listen.

Tom Denman: It seems to me that the crux of your practice is the act of listening – not least when you are interviewing hospital patients. What does listening mean to you?

Francisca Aninat: Well, I think about this a lot. The way I see it, there are different ways of listening, all to do with hearing another person. But it is about so much more than sound or the sense of hearing in the physical or sonic sense. Silence often plays a vital role. In my work, I look for ways of listening nonverbally. I try to create a space where this type of empathic connection can occur, like when I asked the people in the waiting rooms of the San Juan de Dios hospital in Santiago to make things out of thread. Here, the listening was in the collective participation, the vulnerability of their “voices” in the fragility of what they were making and the way they were all making these things together. At Addenbrooke’s, I asked oncology patients if they could draw a map of their journey there. I hoped this might give them a chance to reorient themselves in a tactile way.

For the patients in Chile, the thread was the most important thing. It was a way of writing mentally, often enigmatically, in repetitive gestures. It was about getting involved with something as they waited, not just passively waiting there. Listening meant giving space to someone to be who they are. When we have voice is when we are listened to, and that voice can take many forms, and it doesn’t have to be verbal or declaratory.

In a more recent project in Cambridge, I met a man who had amnesia. I took a wooden board and pieces of fired clay and string, and while he spoke – and with the amnesia patients the conversation was completely unplanned – I used the thread to connect the various components of what he said, and so the thread became the listening. Another woman in the same hospital quite simply gestured at the blue curtain round her bed. There was something in that moment. I cannot put my finger on it.

TD: Do you have a plan as to how your conversations will evolve into a physical artwork?

FA: When I talk to someone, it is a very vulnerable process because I don’t have a predefined idea of what I want. I try to establish some loose coordinates within which we can talk and that’s it. This way of not knowing exactly what the result will be, or even what I am looking for, gives the conversation a sense of mystery that I love. I like to leave things as open as possible and this mystery to follow through to the artwork, with the viewer being a sort of listener. Which means being open to uncertainty, to the unknown. I think this is crucial to my conversations, even if we feel we are heading somewhere. I don’t disregard clear and explanatory artworks, but I feel more of an affinity with ambiguity – which is the ambiguity of relating. There’s ethical responsibility in maintaining it, too.

TD: This mystery is often manifest in your use of layers and stitches, as well as assemblage and found poetry, in your collages.

FA: Yes, I am drawn to accumulation and repetition, a constant redrafting that becomes part of the artwork you see. It goes back to not knowing what the result will be, not planning. When I want to retry something, I leave the previous attempt partly visible. I want to keep the vulnerability you don’t see in a perfect product. Also, ever since I began making art, I have always enjoyed the slowing down of time, feeling it with my fingers – hence the importance of thread. The large installation I presented in my degree show [Exterior/Interior Field, 2007; The Roberts Institute of Art, London] consisted of multiple layers. It was a massive work filling much of the room, and it took a long time to make and to install. And at my current show at 92 Webster Road, I have photographs of matches in a hand, and then there are burnt matches in the wall sculpture. I like the dichotomy of before and after. And then, of course, burnt matches aren’t the sort of thing you keep, let alone display. In them is this sense of time passing.

Stitching became central to my practice early on, when I was still at college. I was drawn to stitching when I began tearing up my paintings and resewing them. I loved the notion of the stitch, the very fabric of a painting, as being about communication. This led to my collaborations with others, in a way. The found objects and words are again about connecting to the world beyond myself. I’m also much inspired by the Chilean tradition of visual poetry, especially Juan Luis Martínez’s La Nueva Novella from 1977, in which he juxtaposes images of, say, Rimbaud with a mathematical formula. And then, on another page, he’ll have some photographs of walking legs next to text commenting on writing and reading – naturally the mind links the two, legs and words. This endless associative play, it’s like magic.

TD: It’s funny you mention Martínez. There’s a line in that book, in English, which reads: “Throught the Looking Glass, and What the Poet Found There”, the typo in keeping with Martínez’s playfulness (the word combining “thought” and “through”, a sort of thinking threshold, perhaps …). The words “Looking Glass” are in the title of your show, which – á la Lewis Carroll – also seems to point to an alternate dimension.

FA: I didn’t have Martínez in mind when I came up with the title, but I love his use of relational forms and the mirror is one of them. Mirrors are also like portals. I have a small mirror in the gallery’s garden, on the ground at an angle, facing the sky. I had the idea for this sculpture when I saw a piece of furniture fly-tipped on the pavement in London. I thought the work would make a nice outdoor counterpoint to the installation inside – as if it were taking you there. I am excited by a sense of trespass, which again is crucial to how we relate to one another. And so the Martínez thing is a funny coincidence!

TD: Over the past couple of years, you have ventured into photography. Could you talk a little about what brought you to the medium?

FA: Well, it’s like a direct extension of what I have always done. Many of my photographs I print on copper plate, and the ones at 92 Webster Road are gum prints. This is a 19th-century method with multiple layers. I always prime the paper with a wash-like mixture of pigment and gum Arabic. The overall feel of the works, once they are developed, is very rough and quite painterly. In all my photographic work – which I often include in my stitched-together collages, too – there’s still a strong sense of layering and touch.

TD: In the way your show at 92 Webster Road is installed, there is a curious sense of something being said, almost a narrative, born out of a relationality of forms.

FA: It all started with these two phrases I noted down at Addenbrooke’s. A woman in one of the waiting rooms was telling me about a recurring dream of being locked in a house and walking from room to room. She said it was like a labyrinth. She talked about mirrors, about turning, this constant need to turn around and around. And I kept revisiting this story in my mind. And when I had the chance to show my work in this room with no windows, with no obvious relation to the rest of the house, the story came back to me. But still, I don’t base my work on the story. What matters is the memory of it, how someone else’s experience stays with you and becomes a part of you. I became interested in the idea of being trapped within oneself, which is also the struggle of relating.

The photographs have these circles in the middle – I think of them almost as camera lenses, or the impulse to make sense of something in the memory, or some fragments we’re trying to recollect. I like to think of them as our goal-oriented and linear – as opposed to lateral – attention. Such attention can be so arbitrary. What’s in the circles is no more in focus than what lies outside them. I also like the warmth in the orange fabric I use in some of the works – it’s like when something lights up the mind, an epiphany maybe.

TD: You have made work responding to the bouts of insomnia you have experienced after transcribing your interviews with hospital patients. I cannot help but be intrigued by this. How does sleeplessness work its way into your art?

FA: Well, the thing is, I am not trained in art therapy. I have stayed away from it because I want to maintain an intuitive approach based on what I know as an artist. Most of the safeguarding is provided by the hospital and so I am free to do this. But this also means I lack the tools to offload what I have taken on. But insomnia doesn’t have to be a negative space, I have come to realise. It is discomfiting, sure, but my experience of it really drove home for me the importance of listening in artmaking.

For my show at the Heong Gallery in Cambridge last year [a dual exhibition with Alexandre da Cunha], I made some photographic collages called Night Visions/Light Shadows. They were made up of images of shadows projected into my flat from the garden at night, with poetic fragments from my conversations in the hospital printed directly on to the surface. When I was unable to sleep, the patients’ voices would manifest visually in the branches I saw on the walls. It’s incredible how the depth of human relations can be found abstracted in the world around us. I’ve also made something else I haven’t shown yet, an “archive” of boxes containing found objects and poetry, sculptures, paintings and photographs, all tiny and fragmented, that carry the strangeness of insomnia.

I want to give space to a listened-to voice in material form. It could be a piece of rough paper with a delicate one laid over it. A fragile thread going through the box. A mirror. I want that voice to fill the space without being explained or explanatory.

TD: Have you noticed any effects of your work, or the processes that go into it, on the people you work with?

FA: It’s subtle, not always easy to pick up on, maybe because the work itself is hard to detach from the process – but, yes. In Santiago, the waiting times in public hospitals are really long. Even still, sometimes a patient would come out of the doctor’s office and say they wanted to stay and complete their piece. And, of course, there was the memorable art opening for patients and staff at San Juan, when they looked at and handled these books I made based on our conversations. And in the UK, well, it has been more of a feeling. I’m thinking of the patients with amnesia. Something happens. Through the process, the patient becomes alert to their sensorial space, and they remember something, a fragment. The energy really shifts, something mystical starts to happen. Words can’t do it justice, but you feel it: in the blue, in the curtain, in the draft through the door opening and closing, in the whirring of machines.

TD: Listening to you now, it occurs to me that your work is less a poetic relaying of a conversation or interaction than something that is poetic from the start. You are neither clarifying nor mystifying anything because you are staying with the mystery of the initial encounter. How would you describe the relationship between the hospital and your studio?

FA: At Addenbrooke’s, I became particularly interested in the patients with recurring treatments, which meant they had to come and go. I decided I would work with the oncology ward, where some patients had been going for years. I always had a health worker with me, and we asked patients in advance if they would be willing to have an interview with me. And I would sit beside them and work with them on the making of a memory map. And they would recall things about their journeys there: the sky, the leaves, the colour of the morning, the weight of the doors. And when I transcribed the interviews, I was amazed by this vivid sensorial recollection. 

Even though the work at 92 Webster Road is farther removed from the hospital than the work I showed in the Heong or Addenbrooke’s (where I also had an exhibition), I like to explore free association without overthinking, and so one project will still seep into the next. This is why I am drawn to collage. Some of the photographs were taken in the garden of the gallery itself. The hospital garden was important for the wellbeing of patients, and so there’s a link of sorts. Again, it’s that passing between the outside to the inside. But none of this is entirely explicit or planned.

TD: You are often drawn to the artist book in your work. Recently, for instance, you made two books inspired by orally transferred botanical knowledge in Chile. My Eyes and My Skin (both 2026) consist of layered medical gauze with stitched patterns and poetic phrases.

FA: I find books fascinating as an art form. The way you can’t see the whole picture in one go. You have to build it up in your mind as you go along, and then there’s the tactile element I love. You don’t normally get to touch artworks, but books really need to be handled – even if you normally can’t when they’re displayed in a gallery or museum. The emphasis on touch, which is very important to me in all my work, even if imagined, is about breaking restrictions.

The books you refer to were commissioned for a small exhibition curated by the art historian Valentina Gajardo at Cambridge University to accompany a symposium around histories of ecological knowledge in Latin America. Deciding to look outside traditional academic botany, I interviewed people living in the Choapa Valley in northern Chile. I asked them about two plants in particular. One was called matico, which I chose because of its healing properties. You can use it on bad cuts to aid cicatrisation. I loved the idea of a plant that is so vital to healing our membrane to the world. And then I was also interested in ruda, which people put at the entrance to their homes. The saying goes that when someone with bad energy comes to your home, the plant will self-combust.

TD: Like the matches on the wall at 92 Webster Road!

FA: Maybe, I was working on the show and the books in tandem, although I can’t say that link was intentional.

TD: I’m reminded of your work in the hospitals, in a way. Not only are the books based on interviews, but they engage with heterodox means of apprehending the world.

FA: Both plants are about how we relate to the world, each in their own way. One is more about the body, the other more about the spaces our bodies occupy. One more physical, the other more about invisible resonances. I tried to capture these two dynamics, the tangible and the strange, and how they might overlap. It felt right to offset the academic discourse of the symposium with the mystery of this oral knowledge that people still use – and, as always, to respect this mystery.

• Francisca Aninat: Four Steps and a Looking Glass is at 92 Webster Road, London, until 11 October.

by NICOLA HOMER

Pedro Cabrita Reis began his career with exhibitions in the 1980s in Lisbon, Portugal, where he was born in 1956. He achieved international recognition at Documenta IX and Documenta XIV in Kassel in 1992 and 2017 respectively. He has represented Portugal at the Venice Biennale and participated in the São Paulo Biennial. His work features in international museum collections. He has had solo exhibitions in the UK and mainland Europe and Canada. He was one of the first artists to exhibit at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, and his work is held in the Tate collection in London. In 2022, he created The Three Graces, a monumental sculpture for the Tuileries Garden at the Louvre in Paris. That year, too, he presented an exhibition at the Church of San Fantin in Venice. 

This year, he has returned to Venice during the city’s 61st biennale, with a show at the Magazzino del Sale 3, the exhibition space of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, part of a complex of historic buildings that runs along the Fondamenta delle Zattere. In the exhibition, XIV Steps, the artist has created a cycle of 14 diptych paintings, inspired by a significant narrative in western art. The Stations of the Cross depicts events in the Passion of Christ. The exhibition has been curated in collaboration with Luca Berta and Michael Short. The accompanying catalogue offers writings on the form and origin of the sequence, and the relations between painting and poetry, and art and art history, which are themes on which the artist expands. He spoke to Studio International via email about his work.

Nicola Homer: It is a pleasure to speak to you again. I understand that you studied at the University of Lisbon’s Faculty of Fine Arts. When did you start enjoying painting?

Pedro Cabrita Reis: The pleasure is mutual.

For as long as I can remember, I have always thought of myself as an artist and always believed that I would become a painter. It was always what I wanted to be. By the age of 14, I already had a small studio, with a somewhat precarious easel in one of the rooms of the house where I lived in Lisbon with my parents and my sister. I still have that easel today, together with many of my earliest works – small paintings on cardboard and Masonite that I made in 1970 and 1971.

Unlike the biographies of many other well-known artists, my story is one in which my parents never opposed my vocation. That was certainly helpful. Let us now hope that history will prove them right.

NH: You represented Portugal at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. How do you feel to have an exhibition of paintings during the 61st Venice Biennale this year?

PCR: I have participated in several other editions of the biennale, in addition to representing Portugal in 2003. My first participation was in 1995, when I represented Portugal alongside two other artists, José Pedro Croft and Rui Chafes. In 1997, I participated at the invitation of Germano Celant. In 2013, I presented A Remote Whisper, a project at Palazzo Falier included in the Collateral Events section. In 2022, at the Chiesa San Fantin, I presented another independent project, Field.

This year, on the occasion of the 61st Venice Biennale, I presented XIV Steps at Magazzino del Sale 3, with the coordination of Luca Berta and Michael Short. The exhibition consists of 14 large diptychs in oil on canvas and proposes a highly personal rereading of the narrative of the Stations of the Cross. Given the importance of the Venice Biennale for any artist – as a moment and a place in which to make one’s work known – there is, without any doubt, an immense pleasure in being able to present these new paintings in Venice.

I should perhaps clarify that I am a painter who has also produced some significant sculptures throughout his career.

NH: Can you tell me about the concept of XIV Steps?

PCR: Like many other artists – whether contemporary, modern or classical – I look to the history of art. Through the study of the works of others, I transform what I learn into a mode of thinking and a practice that ultimately, and in part, gives substance to my own artistic trajectory.

It could be said that the suite of 14 diptychs that constitutes XIV Steps is informed by my engagement with Caravaggio, Rubens, Tiepolo, Grünewald and even Barnett Newman. These paintings are constructed from the very substance of art history. Although they refer to the familiar narrative of the Passion of Christ, they are not religious paintings, just as I am not a religious person. They are simply paintings about other paintings – works created around a story that has traversed the centuries and that, for better or worse, has helped to shape the history of western civilisation and culture. This is the culture to which I belong, and from which I draw a substantial part of what nourishes my art.

These, in a singular sense, are the words I can offer to describe the concept underlying XIV Steps series. They are paintings that are, above all, painting itself. Nothing more.

NH: How did you respond to the historic site at the Magazzino del Sale (Salt Warehouses), where the Republic of Venice once stored one of the most important resources of the Lagoon?

PCR: A work of art must always preserve its conceptual, poetic and semantic autonomy. Under no circumstances should it become hostage to the place in which it is presented for the contemplation of those who experience it emotionally and intellectually. Magazzino del Sale 3 undoubtedly possesses a long and significant history within the city, but this was not the aspect that interested me most when I decided to exhibit XIV Steps there. More than its historiographical or cultural connotations, what fascinated me about the space was its volume and, above all, the manner in which the length of the room creates the possibility of a prolonged trajectory. It establishes a particular way of moving through the space, allowing the viewer to encounter the paintings one after another, at the appropriate rhythm.

I arranged the works precisely with this experience in mind, allowing for a duration of contemplation that demanded an interiorised silence – a singular and individual communion with each of the 14 paintings. Each one in its own time.

NH: This exhibition heralds a new chapter as it departs from your industrial-looking sculptures, which explore philosophical concepts, as seen in your work at the Church of San Fantin in 2022. How did you bring your experience of making sculptures into your paintings?

PCR: I do not believe that my work can be divided according to a moment of rupture between a “before” and an “after”. From the perspective of studio practice, the various disciplines – drawing, painting and sculpture – have always coexisted. Perhaps, at certain moments in my trajectory, one has assumed greater prominence than the others. During the 1980s, my work was fundamentally concerned with painting and was seen primarily in Portugal. The 1990s, and the beginning of my international trajectory, coincided with a greater visibility for my sculpture, although, of course, I never ceased to paint or draw.

As in the history of art itself, different periods succeed one another in response to the political, economic and cultural circumstances that ultimately constitute the course of history. There are likewise no irreversible ruptures within the work of an artist. On the contrary, there is a permanent continuity, continually reconstructed through different perspectives, gestures and forms of thought. What emerges is, therefore, a coherent cartography through which the artist’s work reveals itself.

Indeed, I believe that, although Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) was important in its own time, it has become overvalued. The radical rupture that some commentators attribute to it gradually transformed into yet another step, like any other before or after it, within the permanent continuity of the history of art. It is this continuity that traces the connections between the different phases of my work. There is no hiatus, nor any discontinuity, between my sculpture and my painting. There is only the presence of a thought revealed through the creative act: unified, indivisible and permanent. My sculpture is my painting; my painting is my sculpture; I am both.

NH: How has painting helped you to express traditional scenes associated with the narrative of the Stations of the Cross in this latest Venetian exhibition?

PCR: The Stations of the Cross convey the classical narrative of the Passion of Christ. Throughout the history of art, numerous painters have approached this narrative, interpreting it in different ways across the centuries. The absolutely sublime version that Barnett Newman left us is a unique example of how contemporary art can continue to cast light on an ancient subject such as the Passion of Christ. Beyond the sculptural reliefs that adorn hundreds of churches and mark, within them, the path of Christ’s Passion, I believe that these episodes of the Passion have been, above all, the subject of painting.

My XIV Steps belong to this territory, but without any intention of following the path of traditional, or indeed canonical, representation. And why should they? If the practice of painting has taught me anything, it is that the absolute freedom to reinvent themes belonging to the history of art is itself a form of freedom that reminds us that art continues to bring light, intelligence, and, above all, beauty into the world. Beauty may perhaps be the only means of resisting the stupidity of violence – the violence that oppresses, discriminates, forgets, silences and kills. It is a horror that persists throughout history, and to which art responds with an unequivocal refusal.

NH: Could you tell me about how your work that is currently on show in Venice is an example of your ongoing investigation into culture, memory and the human condition in your artistic practice?

PCR: Even those who do not identify with the texts, liturgy, history or rituals of Christianity, I believe, can recognise that the episode of the Passion of Christ carries implications and admits readings that extend far beyond a merely religious or theological interpretation of the narrative.

When I painted XIV Steps, I began with a story that has been repeated endlessly, with variations and nuances throughout time. For me, however, its principal significance lies in its potential to function as a kind of parable of the human condition, in which social, political, cultural and religious questions converge: the oppressed and the oppressors; heroes and executioners; horror and suffering, but also love and hope. All this has traversed the centuries and continues to exist today. It existed then and continues to exist now. It is the history of humanity; it is the salt of history.

All of this – whether expressed openly or merely suggested – constitutes the substance from which enduring thoughts and visions are formed, whether in poetry, as in the work of Maya Angelou, Pablo Neruda or Paul Éluard; in painting, as in Picasso’s Guernica, Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People or Goya’s The Third of May 1808; or in music, as in Beethoven’s Eroica or Britten’s War Requiem. And what are these works, ultimately, if not expressions of the very nature of the human condition? They are ourselves.

Barnett Newman, in his Stations of the Cross, also speaks to us of this restlessness, of this destiny. Within my art, and within the manner in which I think about it, practise it, and derive lessons from it, there persists a murmur and an echo of that which, throughout our shared history, remains indefinable and which we call the human condition.

NH: I would like to discuss the allegorical content of your work. How do you think that the concept of allegory (a story or a painting in which characters and events offer a symbolic meaning) can provide a framework for people to understand your oeuvre? 

PCR: An image is already, in itself, an allegory, and each person understands it differently according to their social, religious, cultural or political context. The way in which works of art are perceived depends on the cultural, political and social environment of those who encounter them, even though the contemporary world has, to some extent, been levelled and normalised by the internet and social media.

Monet’s Water Lilies will never be identical in the eyes of those who encounter them in different parts of the world. I am absolutely convinced that XIV Steps will likewise be seen in as many different ways as there are different people who encounter them. And every person is, of course, different from every other. This multiplicity of perspectives enriches the meaning of the work and expands its existence. Ultimately, the work is always understood. And the wonder of this is that it is always understood in a personal, intimate, subjective and unique manner. Each work of art becomes a different work of art for each different person.

NH: In an interview with Studio International in 2022, you shared your great knowledge of the canon of art history, from the father of European painting, the great innovator Giotto, to the pioneering 20th-century artist Picasso. What are your favourite paintings? 

PCR: I do not believe that a conclusive answer can ever be given to a question of this nature. Perhaps it would be more productive to ask which artists interest me, and for what reasons. Even then, however, it is likely that certain areas of uncertainty would remain.

It is possible to establish historiographical, critical and formal connections between the works of one artist and those of another. Yet I do not think it is ever possible to know, with any real precision, why an artist becomes interested in the work of another artist or artists, whether they are contemporaries or belong to other periods in the history of art. I believe these are affinities – not precisely elective affinities, but profound, subjective and, above all, emotional ones: a kind of zone of penumbra.

In any case, I always return, with renewed pleasure, to the painting of the so-called Baroque period, with particular attention to Caravaggio, Velázquez, Zurbarán, Rubens and Ribera, as well as to Bernini’s sculpture. Delacroix, Goya, Picasso and Monet have accompanied me, as have Rodin, Bruce Nauman and Barnett Newman. Yet, despite everything, I continue to prefer my own paintings, which ultimately carry within them fragments, moments, and histories drawn from the paintings of the artists I contemplate.

NH: Although the show is coming to an end, I hope you will be able to continue to exhibit your work. Could you tell me about your next steps on your journey as an artist? 

PCR: Well, as we speak – in August 2026 – I am preparing the installation of a major exhibition at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon. It is primarily a painting exhibition, but it will also include a large aluminium sculpture entitled 3=1.

Beyond this, I continue to work, principally through writing, as well as through preparatory drawings and watercolours, on an idea that I have been developing for several years: a series of paintings referring to Goya’s Black Paintings. Ultimately, it is always the same gesture: continually going back and forth, departing from and returning to the history of art. I believe that true contemporaneity does not reside in the frenetic pursuit of puerile novelties that serve only the superficiality of fashion and the voracity of the market. All art is, ultimately, contemporary. To understand this is to understand how we may bring into the present, and into our own work, the manner in which the artists who preceded us transformed their own time into the works they created.

Whether one wishes it or not, and regardless of the modes or forms through which this may occur, art is always political and transformative of the world. The work of Goya, and that of many other artists, speaks to us of precisely this.

• Pedro Cabrita Reis: XIV Steps is at the Magazzino del Sale 3, Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, Venice, Italy, until 22 November. Pedro Cabrita Reis: ‘Without Sorrow of Heart’ is at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon, Portugal, until 15 February 2027.

South London Gallery
10 September – 22 November 2026

by JOE LLOYD

Spare a thought for the South London Gallery’s late-Victorian ceiling beams, which currently bear the weight of eight of Monica Sosnowska’s steel sculptures, some of which weigh more than half a ton and span almost the full height of the capacious main hall. If not for the sunlight streaming through the glass canopy, it might resemble a cold storage unit for the carcasses of broken, brutalised machines, suspended as they await their final fate. Some of them are angry, spiky things, with metal bent into sharp forms and sharper angles – ribbed for your displeasure. Others flow like a line doodle, knotting and twisting around. While several are inscrutable, others appear to display the evidence of a former life: the legs of a lightweight market stall, the steps of a staircase, though not one you would want to climb. While Alexander Calder’s mobiles engender a childlike sense of wonder, these hanging effigies have a sombre disillusionment.

In her practice, Sosnowska, who was born in eastern Poland in 1972 and is now based in Warsaw, has consistently explored the interconnection between architectural, urbanism and social change. She emerged in the early 00s with works including a corridor made from rooms of ever-decreasing size and puddles of dirty, damp water. More recently, she has focused on transforming and deforming pre-existing elements of architecture. In this she is influenced by context. Warsaw is a city that bears the residue of near-constant construction and reconstruction, whether it is the rebuilding of the old town after the second world war, the creation of huge blockhouse estates under communism, or the glassy skyscrapers of its continuing financial boom. Today, Warsaw can seem in a state of constant transformation, with new buildings and infrastructure projects sprouting up at a giddy pace, as if the city is resistant to finding a settled state.

Sosnowska’s sculptures conjure a milieu in which buildings can be discarded like rags. Some of them capture specific stories: the piece made from vendors’ stalls, for instance, gestures towards the informal booths that sprang up around Poland after the fall of communism. The steel staircases are of the type found on the sides of large-scale housing blocks. But as much as they are engaged with history, they are also expressions of form. Sosnowska works with construction companies to fabricate, then transmute, her architectural elements into seemingly impossible configurations – shapes that would be almost unrecognisable to their architects. Often, they achieve a certain grace, as with one painted steel sculpture that looks like a peeling section of a wall or a scrap of torn paper, which forms a flowing loop. From some angles it looks like a dismembered human leg. 

The solidity of Sosnowska’s material is counterpoised with the precariousness of her works’ suspension, as if they could clatter to the ground with an almighty thud. Rebar – steel bars with a rugged texture – are usually used in construction to reinforce concrete. They imply strength and stability. Sosnowska makes them seem limp, useless in their contortion. They might represent the failure of the eras that relied on them, of the modern architecture itself. It is difficult not to be reminded of Vladimir Tatlin’s unbuilt Monument to the Third International (1919-20), intended to be a projector of Soviet power and propaganda but now a symbol for the economic failings of that regime. Hung together in a vast installation, the sculptures’ dangling forms, dancing around each other under the light, carry an echo of constructivist painting and collage, yet denuded of colour and vibrancy, of the spark of life.

It is not all doom and gloom. The spectacle of collapse carries hope for the thing that follows. Some of the suspended items come from gates and doorways, symbols of passing a threshold from one state to another. Over at the SLG’s Fire Station galleries, a suite of seven sculptures using concrete bars sprout like tendrils or branches, suggestive of life emerging from rigid matter. Pot (2018) resembles nothing so much as a plant pot filled with a wiry tree. Another work, comprising three slabs of concrete connected with rebar, could be an abstracted version of a reclining figure. Placed with views over the SLG’s garden yard, these sculptures feel like the elements of a plant-filled terrace, a place of pleasure and relaxation. In the neighbouring room, the enormous steel Stairs (2019) – positioned to echo the SLG’s staircase – is curved up into a shape redolent of a strange undersea creature

There are also elements of humour. A pair of Wallpaper (2024) works have an austere surrealism, suggesting that their room is moulting its skin. One of them, raised on the wall on a corner, curls in such a way as to suggest a beige backroom hiding behind the white cube walls. The other lies crumpled on the floor, as if at rest. I am less fond of Tiles (2024), a set of irregularly cut ceramic tiles with mucky markings resembling abstract expressionist paint; they have a queasy red-brown colour reminiscent of smeared blood – perhaps placed here in reference to the fire station’s interim life as a sausage factory. The overtness of this gesture contrasts with the studied ambiguity of Sosnowska’s sculptural works.

This is the first survey of Sosnowska’s work in London, despite an extensive career that saw her represent Poland at Venice in 2007. The final room of the exhibition makes up for lost time. Dozens of paper and wooden models are displayed behind a purpose-built screen, like models on an architect’s table. These show the variety of her practice to date. There are miniature plans for her installations and sculptures, including one in which a fierce tongue of darkness forks out into a light room; delicate sheets of paper spiralling into squat towers; and a tree-like unit covered in fleshly pink blobs. They give a strong sense of Sosnowska’s ambition and imagination when it comes to reshaping space and material – and also reveal the personal craft behind an oeuvre in which human creations seem subsumed by vast historical forces.

Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery, London
29 July – 8 November 2026

by SABINE CASPARIE

Opened during the UK’s hottest summer on record, Clare Woods: Garden Without Seasons, is an aptly timed exhibition, and Pitzhanger Manor, architect Sir John Soane’s elegant, neoclassical country retreat finished in 1804, the perfect venue, with its pair of 18th-century cedar trees adorning the west lawn. During my visit in late afternoon, I spot people with iced drinks at the outdoor gallery cafe or lingering in the large park at the back of the building. A fox looks at me through the glass windows, before slipping off into the shaded bushes of the landscaped garden (Regency-style, also designed by Soane).

Entering the main gallery, you face the large, frieze-like painting Nothing Permanent (2025), its bouquet of candy-coloured flowers almost jumping out from a plain green vase. The flowers are juicy with visible paint strokes so thick and fluid that you almost want to lick them off the canvas. Behind the bouquet, a zingy zig-zag pattern, too vivid to be wallpaper, provides an interesting, almost nervous energy, a nice contrast with the more rounded shapes of the flowers. The backrest of an elegant chair is just visible in the bottom left corner, to anchor the explosion of flowers and suggest an interior. A demure Dutch still life bouquet this definitely isn’t.

Woods was, in fact, inspired by historical still life paintings, in particular 19th-century French painter Édouard Manet’s small paintings of flowers, made as he lay bed-bound at the end of his life. But she also likes to work from photographs. “I take out a lot of information and just leave a line, like a trace of what’s there,” she says in one of the voice recordings on Pitzhanger Manor’s online exhibition guide (an inventive use of interpretation by the gallery). “That line is the base of the paintings, which I then draw on the aluminium panel and fill in. It’s like recreating the image but with different colours and less information, remodelling it in a way.” 

Woods is describing her trademark technique, in which she works on aluminium panels laid flat on a table, applying layers of paint like a sculptor laying bricks. The aluminium base with the wet-on-wet application of oil paint gives the resulting paintings a wonderfully lush appeal. In another large, portrait-shaped painting, Under the Dome (2024), the movement of the brush is mainly vertical – an interesting notion in itself when thinking of Woods bent over her composition at an angle unconventional to most painters. Under the Dome is based on a photograph of the Temperate House at Kew Gardens, and the upright architecture of the glass dome at its centre is mirrored by tall palm trees on either side. A splash of burnt orange contrasts with the almost moody symphony of blues and greens. It is a sharp and subtle colour interruption that almost looks accidental, but is certainly the result of a meticulous design by the artist.

Trackwalker and Cold Case (both 2025), two medium-sized paintings featuring a grid of circles in shades of greens and reds, come closest to abstraction, although the paintings were, in fact, based on images of stained glass. It seems that abstraction is not something that hugely interests Woods. “My images are recognisable or more abstract; sometimes [the view] is just closer in, like a crop,” she says. The multiple shades of red in Cold Case are dripping with paint, a hospital palette of fresh and old blood, possibly from the crime scene to which the title alludes. Initial Wave, a closeup of a chandelier in front of a window, expands on Woods’s interest in glass and windows, and their ability to mirror, divide and obscure.

Curatorially, the works in the main gallery respond spectacularly to their setting: Soane’s skylit glass dome, with its intricate lines and star-shaped centre is in dialogue with Under the Dome; the row of small windows with silhouettes of the trees in the park behind the gallery mirrors the windows in Initial Wave. Three collages in the north gallery – poetically titled Collage for the Stand, Collage for the Farewells and Collage for Losing the Garden – give another way into Woods’s floral universe. Composed of fragments of oil paint on paper, these works are flatter, less oily and less visceral, but the diluted brushstrokes provide an interesting texture not unlike the grains of wood. 

But this is more than an exhibition about the joys of the botanical world. The 29 works were all created over the last four years, and many during the pandemic, a time of sickness in Woods’s personal life and on the global stage. Woods was interested in the heightened resonance of familiar objects, our worlds reduced to our homes and gardens. The subtitle, Garden Without Seasons, also hints at the darker undertones of the present: the terrifying acceleration of climate change; the capitalist notions of flowers (and other products) available everywhere and at all times.

In the main house, a closeup painting of a bouquet in the large drawing room is slightly underwhelming above the fireplace in the Georgian Eating Room, especially after witnessing the luminosity of the paintings in the main gallery. The rest of the house is mainly filled with Woods’s screenprints. Two closeup images of chandeliers adorn another fireplace in the Small Drawing Room, and a series of vases and vessels installed in grid formation in the Soane Gallery is pleasant enough. But where the collages show an interesting new angle to Woods’s process, the uniqueness and directness of her technique get lost in the prints. Like fresh flowers, Woods’s paint is much better preserved in the moment, instead of recreated in reproduction. 

Overall, though, this exhibition is the artist at her best – a true homage to her practice and to her incredible skill in rendering the floral world, as well as a reminder of the fragility of life. Not long ago I heard of a quote by Soane (relayed by Antoni Malinowski, whose paintings were exhibited at Pitzhanger Manor in 2025). Soan used to say that architecture is a vessel for light. In that analogy, a painting by Woods could be a seen as a vessel for life: sometimes calm and subdued; sometimes restless and nervous; often joyful and jubilant. As I leave the exhibition, a part of me wishes that Woods, one of the best painters of her generation, would veer outside the safe, traditional subject matter of flowers, gardens and botanical architecture. But another part, standing face-to-face with her giant, shimmering paintings, transfixed and pulled head-first into her sensual world, wants to look at these fireworks of nature for ever. 

National Galleries Scotland: Modern Two, Edinburgh
1 August 2026 – 4 January 2027

by ANNA McNAY

What an absolute treat! Following Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris (showcased at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, and the Holburne Museum, Bath, in 2023-24), this exhibition of John’s works was going to take a lot to impress, but impress it does – and how! Not only does it comprise a multitude of paintings by the Welsh artist, but these are complemented throughout by drawings – some paired with similar paintings, others in groups and series of their own – and, as the cherry on top, letters and notebook and journal entries, discussing life, love, painting, process, progress and the future. 

The exhibition begins with early works by the artist, made when she was a student at the Slade, mainly depicting her family members. An overcast day by the beach in Tenby, a pensive study of her sister Winifred looking down, one of her close friend Grace Westray playing the violin, and, of course, a self-portrait in a vivid red blouse, her direct gaze engaging the viewer. Already, in this latter work, John (1876-1939) is showing signs of her later developments towards plain backgrounds with isolated (literally and metaphorically) figures. A particularly fun piece is Portrait Group (1897-98), a watercolour and pencil sketch, depicting her family and friends in their shared lodgings at 21 Fitzroy Street in central London. Her younger – but already more famous – brother, Augustus, is lording it in his straw hat, while Winifred, who was studying music, sits in white at the piano. It is further thought that the couple outside the window are John and her boyfriend, Ambrose McEvoy. There is also a portrait of Mrs Atkinson (c1898), John’s landlady at the time, set against intimiste-style wallpaper. Presciently, there is then a sketch of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin, John’s later lover, drawn with the tender care and attention only a lover might pay (note, particularly, the absolutely beautiful, crinkled ear and stray strands of hair from his beard). 

A couple of nude sketches attest to John’s having attended life classes at the Slade, and other early works include portraits of Grilda and Chloë Boughton-Leigh, friends who shared her love of books and cats, and the exquisite The Student (1903-04), which depicts Dorelia McNeill, the friend with whom John set off on foot for Rome from Bordeaux, ultimately only reaching Toulouse, and then continuing to Paris. Dorelia later became the lover of Augustus, at first in a menage-à-trois with his wife, Ida. 

While there is a danger in focusing too much on the biography of an artist, John’s early work speaks, through her choice of sitters, of just that. It is therefore wonderful to next come upon a display of letters to her friend Ursula Tyrwhitt, mostly written from Paris, describing her room and her learnings. One from near the end of her life, dated to c1936, shows how she continued learning, with her English characterfully dotted with numerous Frenchisms. A letter to Véra Oumançoff, a Parisian neighbour with whom she became besotted, describes her practice of drawing in church (John converted to Catholicism in 1913 following the end of her relationship with Rodin), which was frowned on by the priest, and, it seems, also by the letter’s recipient. An exercise book, spanning 1917 to 1925, details various rules and methods John devised for her colour mixing. None of this is misplaced, either, since John wrote in a letter to her friend Michel Salaman in 1902: “To me the writing of a letter is a very important event!”

As we move upstairs to a lemon-yellow room, we move in spirit to Paris. Here we see two of John’s best-known pictures, showing her little attic bedroom, also painted in pale lemon, in which her presence is felt, despite her physical absence, through the inclusion of markers such as a posy of flowers or an open book on the table and a jacket and a parasol over the arm of the chair. Also shown as pairs are A Lady Reading (c1910) and Girl Reading at a Window (c1911), in the latter of which John has replaced the Madonna’s head with her own, and Girl with Bare Shoulders (c1910) and Nude Girl (c1910), in which the sitter, Fenella Lovell, holds virtually the same pose minus her garb, engendering thoughts of Goya and his La Maja Desnuda (1797-1800). Fittingly, for a work thus showing her gravitas, this latter piece (along with A Lady Reading) was the first of hers to enter the Tate collection in 1917. 

One wall in this room is dedicated to sketches of John’s cats, including the beloved Edgar Quinet (named after the street in which she lived). This extract from a letter to McNeill shows something of her relationship with her pets: “I wrote to you some time ago but the letter was left on the table and is now covered with Edgar Quinet’s footmarks. I have just been singing Alice Ben Bolt but Edgar Quinet does not like it and bites my chin.” The sketches are certainly loving and intimate.

The facing wall features three of John’s eight paintings of an unknown sitter in a blue dress set against a terracotta background. This is the earliest in her many series of works, where compositions vary incidentally. The next room then contains a wall of nun paintings from a series commissioned by the Dominican convent in Meudon of portraits of the founder, Mère Marie Poussepin. Although the plan was for one painting to hang in each room, only one was installed in the convent for a short period in 1920, before it was purchased by the artist’s patron, the American collector John Quinn. These remarkable paintings also show John’s method of applying the paint, which she termed “blobbing” – thick paint applied in short brushstrokes. Alongside this, she was beginning to mix resin into her paint, which gave it its grainy surface texture. In some of the lesser finished works, her process can be seen most clearly – Young Woman Holding a Cat (c1920) and Study of a Woman in a Mulberry Dress (c1923), on show in later rooms, are a case in point. 

Visitors next enjoy a wall of the aforementioned controversial church sketches, made during Vespers. It was about this time that John described herself as “God’s little artist: – a seer of strange beauties. A teller of harmonies. A diligent worker,” adding: “Very little they may be but that doesn’t matter – He accepts them.” She went on to make drawings and watercolours of the congregation for more than 20 years, filling sketchbooks and loose papers. Her subjects are almost always depicted from behind or in profile and, as John herself advised: “My drawings are much better seen in sets.” Certainly, there is something very special about being engulfed by the one subject or setting, as visitors are in this exhibition – it gives a sense, perhaps, of John’s dedication to her subjects, and her almost fanatical drawing and redrawing, painting and repainting of the same thing over and over again.

By working in this way, John was able to experiment, and amend her colours and tones as she went. She created rules for herself and worked with colours by connecting each to a specific object in her visual memory. As she wrote to Tyrwhitt: “Rouge Phénicien is the colour of what we called wild geranium. The stems are dark crimson, the leaves seem dipped in pale crimson just now, the rest of the leaves are somewhat Anglais. Earlier in the summer the leaves are emerald green all over.” In 1923, she wrote a note to herself to “paint as you do your drawings”, and, at about the same time, she began to use some brighter colours in her oil paintings. Nevertheless, her watercolours remain her boldest experiments, and it is wonderful to see so many of them, including the cats, the congregation and a series of Breton children, as well as her so-called “little paintings”, which never left her studio, all from Amgueddfa Cymru’s collection, and rarely on display. 

Perhaps my favourite series of paintings, however, is The Convalescent, for which John made 11 versions of the girl, dressed in blue, sitting on a wicker chair, with a book or letter and a cup of tea. In The Seated Woman (c1920), a strand of dark hair falls across the girl’s cheek, while in The Letter (c1920), a faint smile caresses the corners of her mouth. This model remains unidentified, despite having sat for more than 60 paintings. Nevertheless, it might be understood that John sought to represent something of herself in each picture, with her patron’s art adviser and friend, Jeanne Foster, stating (after modelling for John a number of times): “She takes down my hair and does it like her own … she has me sit as she does, and I feel the absorption of her personality as I sit.” This intimate sense of person is surely felt across John’s oeuvre. 

My overall favourite work, though, was new to me (always a nice surprise): Girl in Profile (c1920). It has about it all that is quintessentially John: a girl in a blue dress and cape, sitting against a pale khaki background, with a beige shawl into which her hair disappears, melding in tone. Her hands are clasped and she looks to the side, a strand of hair loose across her pink cheek. The scumbled blobbing is evident, and the thickness of the paint gives the work an almost sculptural quality. It is simply divine. 

The exhibition ends with a short film about John and her work. Here she is poignantly quoted as saying: “I don’t know why my vision will have value, but I know it will.” If only she could see this tour-de-force show and be proud. 

Born in rural Ireland in 1949, John Gibbons moved to London in the 1970s, when he studied at St Martin’s School of Art and worked as an assistant to the portrait sculptor Oscar Nemon. Rooted in the discipline of formalist abstraction, Gibbons has created a wide-ranging, undogmatic and highly personal body of work, responsive to the contemporary urban environment and to art and objects from across cultures, from Dogon ladders of West Africa to Rodin. 

His approach is rooted in an improvised responsiveness to materials, whether sourced in the scrapyard or bought from stock, and here he talks about his use of stainless steel from the estate of the American sculptor David Smith. The aim is an untranslatable encounter between viewer and object. Whatever went into the making of a sculpture, or whatever memories it may evoke in the audience, for Gibbons any meaningful experience of art happens in the present, sculpture is always NOW. “You are not in control,” he says. “You have to give yourself to what you are doing, and see what happens.”

Interview by SAM CORNISH
Filmed and edited by MARTIN KENNEDY

by SABINE CASPARIE

The culturally rich and vibrant city of Edinburgh isn’t renowned for its weather, but having set off from London in the middle of a July heatwave, it is a delight for me to step off the train in an agreeable 25C. When Eva Rothschild walks me around her show at Fruitmarket before our interview, the first work we encounter is Amphi (2019). It was made for the Irish Pavilion of the 2019 Venice Biennale and shown last year at the Kunstverein Hannover for An Exhibition for Children (And Other People) curated by Jeremy Deller. In Fruitmarket’s bright Upper Gallery with its skylight window, the stacked boxes, with their white surfaces and colourful marks of spray paint, look almost serene. But, as with many of Rothschild’s sculptures, there is an invitation to the audience to climb on them, and so I do. They instantly turn from minimalist, grid-like installation to the amphitheatre alluded to in their title.

Rothschild is interested in titles and the extra layers they add to her works, evoking associations rather than imposing a fixed interpretation. She uses a broad and diverse range of materials for her sculptures, which often reveal themselves only after prolonged looking – something she really values. In Hangouts (2018), hoodies coated in jesmonite are draped over a three-dimensional grid made of steel, inserting associations of the body and the domestic into the geometric forms. In the Lower Gallery, Watcher (2026) is made from cut scraps of clay, which are bisque fired and then glazed in manganese giving the effect of bronze – a multilayered material transformation. In a small room off the main Lower Gallery, The Grit (2026), a monumental pile of stacked mattresses in a hand-dyed fabric with colourful geometric motifs, immediately draws your eyes. “I made the decision to put that gigantic sculpture in that tiny room, where you would normally expect to see something smaller, like the ceramic sculptures,” Rothschild explains. Mats with similar patterns reappear in the Warehouse, a later extension to the Upper and Lower Galleries, and a more industrial space. Here, they are scattered together with soft cones and triangles, functioning as a seating area from which to watch her new film, Safe (2026).

Rothschild often reuses materials and motifs in different contexts, and Safe (2026) features a public commission from 2021: a bright yellow, ziggurat-like playground construction, one of two structures titled Parsloes Memphis and co-commissioned by Create London and the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham for Parsloes Park, Becontree. It’s not just the pulling through of a material narrative thread that Rothschild enjoys; equally important is giving the audience a sense that the encounter with her work is created for the body. The film builds on Boys and Sculpture (2012), in which children from a primary school near Whitechapel Gallery were invited into a room in the gallery containing various of Rothschild’s sculptures: entering the room tentatively, they then completely dismantled the works, ecstatic with joy. The solid playground structure of Safe (2026) invites a different approach. In the first half, a group of young boys from the area is seen climbing on it, hanging from it and kicking a ball around underneath it. In the second half, a group of adolescents takes their place – including students from one of Sadler’s Wells dance programmes (Rothschild was commissioned to make two large tapestries for Sadler’s Wells East in 2025). It is fascinating to watch the different body language of the older boys, their movements slower and lankier, scrolling on their phones and practising short dance routines. At the end of the film, the grey clouds lift to let in the auburn light of the setting winter sun, bathing the scene in a warm glow.

Rothschild talked to Studio International at Fruitmarket on the afternoon before the opening of her exhibition The Void Presses the Wall.

Sabine Casparie: The architecture of the spaces in which you exhibit is an important element of your work. How did the architecture of Fruitmarket influence the selection and placing of the artworks?

Eva Rothschild: There are three galleries, but they aren’t connected; you have to leave one before you enter the next one. The Upper Gallery is really bright and has a clarity to it, whereas the Lower Gallery is more bunker-like. The upstairs space is punctured by the staircase, and I chose Amphi (2019) for the end of that space: you climb the stairs, and then you have the possibility to continue by climbing on the blocks, so it gives the sense of ascension. The space has a clarity to it, and it was important to me to have these clear works: contained and sharp, to maintain that sense of focus and tightness. The downstairs space is more bounded, and the works there are more diverse. Diversity of making and materials is essential to what I do, and given the scope of the show, I felt it was important to include as much as was possible of the ways of making I habitually engage in. The warehouse space is totally different; it has a real physicality to it. I made Safe (2026), the film, especially for that gallery.

SC: Materiality is important for sculptures in general, but for you particularly. In many of your works there is a contrast inside the works: we think we are seeing one material, but we then find out it is a different material. For example, the blocks in Amphi look like polystyrene but are made of resin. Why do you think that is so important?

ER: It’s intrinsic to cast objects, but with an artwork there is also a transformational function. It’s about creating a kind of material confusion: something is alike and not alike. This in turn creates a focus: the viewer is both understanding what they’re seeing and not understanding. That leads to a more searching way of looking, and an intensity of the gaze. And, I hope, an expansion of thinking around the work.

SC: You started your education at a convent school. Did that way of contemplative and meditative looking that we practise with religious objects influence you?

ER: To an extent – going to religious school was absolutely the norm in Ireland then. Catholicism has a very strong visual culture. The idea of the devotional object or image as a stand-in for the spiritual or transformative moment has influenced me greatly.

SC: When you look at a painting, it can open up, whereas with sculpture it feels more like you are closing something down. How do you find ways to make a statement through sculpture beyond the material?

ER: I don’t see sculpture as closing anything down, I just think it is experienced differently from painting. When I am making a work, I don’t ask: “What does this say?”; I think: “What is this? What can this be?” Making sculpture is quite obtuse: physically, it doesn’t fit easily in a house, it is a nightmare to store and, to engage with it, you have to create a separate space. I like that. It’s like a contract you enter into about the space and its rules. Paintings compete with pictures, and pictures are everywhere – in your pockets on your phone! – whereas the obtuse nature of sculpture makes it not really exist in another context. I have made a lot of public sculpture and that responds to the architecture and the buildings, but when I make sculptures for an exhibition, I like the idea that they are held within a kind of stasis in that space.

SC: How did you come up with the title of the work, The Void Presses the Wall? It seems contradictory: a void can’t press anything.

ER: I was thinking about bubble gum (mimics the movement of blowing a bubble). A pressure is exerted by the breath, and the bubble gives the idea of a mass, but there is nothing there. But even if there is nothing there, that void is still filling the space; the nothingness is a presence. Most of my work, even though it might be big, is open inside; it is not about the mass. Linear forms can be expansive: even though they reduce the volume, they occupy space. Expressing that kind of negative space in language was something I was interested in doing.

SC: I am thinking of Barbara Hepworth! 

ER: Yes, absolutely.

SC: When you are making an artwork, do you think about how someone viewing it will approach it? 

EV: No, not at the beginning. Although I collaborate with fabricators sometimes, most of my work is done in the studio. To make an object, I first want to understand what its possibilities are. I make a lot of objects that are accumulated, without a clear sense of where they are going, and often the materials will suggest the iteration. It’s like building a vocabulary, or an alphabet, and the studio is really the site of that. Then when I install my work, I have to consider that it responds to the body. All these objects were made in the studio, but they didn’t fully become sculptures until I installed them, so I am learning about them as they come into being. When we viewed The Grit (2026) earlier, the room with the mattresses, the sound changed when we were talking. The work created a block in the room, and the mattresses absorbed all the ambient sound, and I hadn’t anticipated that – I found it quite overwhelming. I only learned that about the piece today, so there was a sense of discovery for me, as I became the audience for the work. That’s the risk and reward of making the work I do. Audience and location can create the final work.

SC: Your interest in the location of the work and its relationship to the body manifests in your film Safe (2026), shown in the Warehouse. It features one of the two playground structures from Parsloes Memphis (2021), a bright yellow pyramid made up of stacked, transparent steel quadrants. During the film, younger and older boys are seen interacting with the structure. What inspired you to make the film? 

ER: When I made the playground, I had wanted to make a film with local boys, but it was impossible due to the pandemic. The film was a way of observing and collaborating with a group who the structure was designed for. A playground is one of the few urban things that is there for you to climb all over, a structure purely for physical engagement. I designed it with older kids in mind; they use playgrounds in different ways from little kids, unsupervised and after hours. It was important to me that the structure was high and could be used to sit on, and that the children could climb to the top and feel a sense of ownership; they could be “king of the castle”. There is something really simple about that – I wanted to make something that had that sense of somewhere you could hang out.

SC: Your earlier film, Boys and Sculpture (2012), shown at Whitechapel Gallery, featured boys from a local primary school. Is there a reason you chose to work with boys in both films?

ER: That film came from the period I spent teaching, and also from having gone to an all-girls school – the differences I felt between boys and girls in terms of taking up space and interacting with the world. With Parsloes Memphis, I was thinking about this but also had the experience of my sons growing up. As well as the local schoolboys, the film features students from Sadler’s Wells’s Academy Breakin’ Convention, an alternative dance and hip-hop programme for 16- to18-year-olds. I am really interested in the movement of the body in relation to objects and, with the age groups represented here, there is that sense of physicality and we can observe the interaction between the older and younger groups. Also, by the time I was making Safe, something had shifted in the conversation around boys and men. There is so much negativity now around young men and the constant sense of “toxicity”, regardless of what they are doing. I wanted to make something positive that countered that.

SC: Your art is often placed in the context of minimalism. Your films address masculinity, and what it feels like to live as a man in the world, but stylistically, your sculptures seem to subvert that very masculine sensibility of 1960s minimalist art, by inserting softness and playfulness. You have previously used the term “magic minimalism”. Can you say a bit more about that?

ER: I said this once years ago, and the term has followed me around! But it does describe what interests me. I think of minimalism as so pure, trying to be free of associations, but for me, the more minimal the object is, the more transcendent it is. If you think of the crystal ball, a sphere, there is pure materiality, but also divination. I believe it is a conceit that something could float free of our associative looking. I just think it’s impossible. The associative, kinetic, bodily sense of something, and what happens with that, is what interests me.

SC: Your sculpture Festival (2026) is displayed alongside Safe (2026), mirroring its pyramid-like forms. It made me think about one of Cold Corners (2009), your Duveens commission at Tate Britain. There is that same sense of a geometric shape that angles around the architecture of a space – the neoclassical columns at Tate, and the Warehouse’s industrial pipes at Fruitmarket. Cold Corners was shiny, black and made of steel, whereas Festival (2026) seems much more irreverent; it is colourful and light, made of textiles on an armature of cardboard and bamboo. Is that a matter of being more confident as your career progresses?

ER: Possibly. Getting older, I have a different knowledge of my work. I like the idea of making quite “un-resourced” sculptures, making something grandiose out of something economical. Festival (2026), shown alongside the steel, structured pyramid in the film, is the almost pathetic pyramid. I was also thinking of Glastonbury, and the hippy ideology; the way in which people buy into a romantic or transcendent idea through objects. Like the rubber locks in New Romantix (2026), which are influenced by the locks people put on bridges as a romantic gesture.

SC: Do you see your sculptures as creatures with a life in them?

ER: The thing I really resist is figuration. That doesn’t mean I don’t think about my sculptures as having an aura around them. Sometimes, I may see a sculpture as friendly, hostile or weak. I give attributes, but that is different from narrative figuration.

SC: You recently made two tapestries for Sadler’s Wells East, The In Breath and The Out Breath (2025). A pair of tapestries is currently on view at Goodwood Art Foundation, too. How was it to work in that medium?

ER: I have always been interested in rugs. Like the mattresses, they take on forms you associate with paintings, but they don’t have a surface quality. There is no skin. I began working with West Dean College in West Sussex 12 years ago. They placed an open call as they were looking to work with contemporary artists, and the piece I made with them is now in the Tate collection. For Sadler’s Wells East, I initially thought I would make a sculpture, but when I saw the architecture of the building, there were two large walls, and I immediately thought I would make two tapestries. Working with West Dean College was an amazing process: they dye all the wool for the tapestries, so the specificity of colour is amazing. What’s also incredible is that wool has no reflectivity – none! There’s nothing being lost. When you look, it is completely absorbing.

SC: I like that the tapestries seem to create space, even though they are flat.

ER: Yes! you wouldn’t think that on tapestry you can make this illusionistic space, but the way you can work with the gradients really opens up that three-dimensionality.

SC: In your tapestries, the colours are geometric and controlled, but coming back to Amphi (2019), the work mentioned at the beginning, the colour on the stacked boxes is much more expressive. 

ER: With spray paint, I was always interested in what it stands for – the urban environment – and I made quite a lot of work with graffiti artists in the 90s. But I am also really interested in how it moves. It’s paint, but there is no brush; you are making a mark while being removed from it. The paint is travelling and then it hits an obstacle, so it is an arrest rather than a gesture. I find that interesting technically. We use it to express, but it’s a different type of mark: an arrested mark without that sense of touch.

SC: What is the most surprising reaction you had from the public, or the most memorable one?

ER: (Thinks for a moment). I had another artist visit one of my exhibitions, and he told me afterwards that he found it interesting that rather than illusionistic materiality, my works had confused materiality. I really liked that.

• Eva Rothschild: The Void Presses the Wall is at Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, until 11 October.

At its simplest, Miranda Boulton (b1973, Cambridge) paints flowers; in a little more depth, her abstracted paintings deal with questions of memory and time. Using the process of slow-looking, she spends hours with other artists’ floral still-lifes, absorbing them and committing them to memory. Then she settles down to paint, allowing memories of the work(s) she studied to intermingle with things that happened that morning and thoughts running through her mind. The output is series after series of vibrant works, some where the subject matter is more apparent than others. The works on paper are freer and more experimental, heavy under the weight of so much paint. The canvases seem tighter, more considered, but riotous nevertheless.

For her first institutional exhibition, Boulton studied the works of Eloise Harriet Stannard and Emily Stannard, two 19th-century painters and prominent members of the Norwich Society of Artists. Discovering their shared inspirations, Boulton followed in Emily’s footsteps with a trip to Amsterdam, where she studied the works of Jan van Huysum in the Rijksmuseum. Although not shown together with Boulton’s, the Stannards’ pictures have been brought out of storage and are on display in another gallery at Norwich Castle, creating, as Boulton puts it – and has titled her show – a Chain of Flowers.

Anna McNay: Tell me about Emily and Eloise Stannard. Who were they, and why are they of interest to you?

Miranda Boulton: About five years ago, I was researching floral still-life painting, and I was looking at Germaine Greer’s book The Obstacle Race. She has a chapter on floral still-lifes and feminism, and she mentions the Stannards. Emily is the aunt, and Eloise Harriet is her niece. I started to research them, and I discovered the Norwich Society of Artists, and found out what a prolific school it was in the 19th century. I learned that there were paintings here in the collection [at Norwich Castle], so I came and met with the curator, Georgia Bottinelli, who showed me the paintings, which were in the stores at the time. Two have since been restored, and they have been brought out to coincide with my exhibition. It’s been lovely to work with the collection and shine a light on this very specific subject within the works.

I have a process I have developed over the years when I spend time with paintings slow looking. I try to do it in real life as much as possible, but, with these works, because they were in the stores, I spent a little bit of time there, took photos, and then spent more time really absorbing the images online. Then I paint from memories of the works. We had a big discussion before the exhibition was put together about whether to put the Stannards’ paintings within the exhibition itself, but, because my work is about layers of memory and as much about forgetting as remembering, we ultimately decided to leave them apart, but we put up wall texts so that people realised the link – the chain of flowers.  

It’s interesting for me as I was born in Cambridge, grew up in Ipswich and came to Norwich quite often as a girl. Norfolk, Suffolk, you know, it’s this localised history. I think the older you get, the more you look back at your childhood and your locality, and it makes more sense. It feels like there’s a beautiful synergy to this project.

AMc: Emily went on a trip to Amsterdam, and I believe you have retraced her steps.

MB: Yes, something else interesting that I found we have in common, when I was researching Emily, was that we have the shared influence of the Dutch still-life painters. I found out that she went over to the Netherlands in 1820. She went to the Prince William V in The Hague, and then on to the Rijksmuseum, which was in the historic Trippenhuis at the time, before it moved to its current location, but it still had an amazing collection. She got permission to make copies of Jan van Huysum’s paintings in the Rijksmuseum, and the director at the time praised her work. I was amazed because I knew Van Huysum’s work. It was more Rachel Ruysch that I had worked from, but I’m very aware of Van Huysum. The title of my exhibition, Chain of Flowers, references these influences that flow through the generations.

Before I started this body of work, I went to Amsterdam and spent a lot of time slow looking in the Rijksmuseum. I was there for a week and spent about two or three hours staring at different paintings, and it felt amazing. It’s quite a meditative experience, and I think it has really affected how I paint as well. The memories are both very clear and very hazy, and that’s kind of the point. It’s about trying to express how memory works, and how we remember things, and how what you have been doing the morning before a painting session can affect it as much as the memory you’re trying to pull up. It’s the fluidity, the messiness, that I’m really trying to pull out within the mark-making.

AMc: Broad brush, your work deals with ideas of memory and time.
MB: When you are painting, you are literally marking space in time. I think about how the surface of a painting takes time to digest. They’re like time capsules. What you see initially, you will never see again, because your eyes will start to read the painting and unpick it, and you will bring your subjectivity to it. I absolutely adore this about painting, the immediate response you never get again. It makes sense to me to spend time looking at something and then slowly making it. It’s the antithesis of the world we live in; it’s the slowing down and consideration that painting allows.

I often think of my paintings as timelines or intrigue: they build up layers over time, so they give over time as well. I suppose it’s all these bits that come together in my process when I paint, which is quite instinctive, intuitive, spontaneous. It takes me about half an hour to get to a place where I’m really flowing, responding to the marks, and I don’t really want to be aware of what I’m doing. I want it to be a very instinctual experience. I think of it as going underwater and coming up and seeing what you’ve done, and then you dive back in again, and then it’s a dance between those two opposites.

AMc: Do you have one specific work in mind that you are responding to when you paint, or is it a mixture of more than one?

MB: That’s a really interesting question, because I really changed my practice about a year and three-quarters ago. I had quite a cathartic experience which changed what I was doing. I used to always try to have just one memory and cling to it …

AMc: … And that was from looking online, wasn’t it?

MB: Yes, more online, because it was about slowing the pace of the images that we’re being fed. But then I started doing more in-life slow looking, which changed things. I had an experience when I saw a Joan Snyder exhibition, Body and Soul, at Thaddaeus Ropac in December 2024. It was one of those experiences that just hit me. I found her work so visceral, so intriguing – she is punk and rebellious, her visual language is incredibly complex, and her use of material to evoke feeling is so sophisticated. There’s an ancient-contemporary clash. I got to know her, because I interviewed her for Turps Magazine, and she really affected me. Looking at her work gave me confidence – it was like taking the stabilisers off a bike. The flow of the painting process became much looser, and now I just go with whatever comes to me. I start with a painting, I think all artists have to find their way in, but then I’m much more relaxed, maybe more confident. I don’t know if the work is any different, but the process is more developed. Allowing the memories to surface. I have absorbed so many different artists, as all painters do, men and women. It might be Morandi, Manet – I spent more time looking at Manet paintings last week at the Musée d’Orsay. It can be completely random, or it could be a memory of my grandfather’s work when I was six in his studio that comes to me.

AMc: Was your grandfather an artist?

MB: He was a painter, and that was very much where my love of painting began. And why floral still-life painting means a lot to me personally, because he did a lot of floral still-lifes.
He died before I was born, and my granny kept his studio the same as it was when he died. I used to sneak in, and nobody knew I was in there, and I used to stare at the paintings on the easels. Some were finished, some weren’t, and they really stood in for him. So, there’s very much a poignant, personal aspect. There are personal histories within the wider realms of art history.

AMc: In the time that I have known you, your works have certainly become more abstract.

MB: Yes, I think I have let go. It’s like a muscle memory, when you do something over and over again: the vase is still there, it’s just exploded, and it had to explode at the right time. That’s basically what happened with the Snyder influence. I can go to the edges, I can let go of the memories, but the vase is still in there. Sometimes it comes back more. I think maybe the works on paper have more of a figurative element. Scale does make a difference: the brushes are bigger, the gestures are bigger, it’s more expansive.

AMc: The canvas must respond to the oil paint differently from the paper as well.

MB: Yes. The works on paper are a vital part of my practice. I never do preliminary drawings; it is all from memory and it’s in the moment. I work very much in series, looking at a new painter or thinking about a new environment that I’m responding to. I see the works on paper as a kind of root system to the whole thing. They’re very spontaneous, they’re free, I don’t mind when they rip, they’re very experimental. Then the minute you get to canvas, there’s a slight weight, an expectation that you have to make it work, you have to push through, whereas the works on paper are intuitive, and I find lots of new mark-making comes to the forefront. I find them really exciting.

AMc: Do you go back to your paintings, or do you create them in one big burst of energy?

MB: Usually, I go back to them. Occasionally a painting will come through when it’s really fresh, and I can’t work back into it because it just works and clicks. I find those frustrating, although I love them. They have very different energy. Celia Paul talked about this in her book Self-Portrait; she said a painting that has been done quickly is like a newly decorated room and the air is fresh empty and echoing, whereas a painting that has been done slowly is like a room that has been quietly lived in, it acquires a mysterious stillness. I love this way of thinking. Of the paintings here, I think Garlands and Wreaths II (2025) has just two or three layers, whereas Wild Flower Riot (2025) was five or six different paintings during its making. I don’t think it changes how you react to the paintings, but I think the more-layered ones possibly give a little bit more over time.

AMc: I love that smudge in the middle of Wild Flower Riot. Is it all brushwork, or do you use other implements?

MB: It’s mainly brushwork. Occasionally I’ll use my fingers and rags. I get incredibly messy and covered in paint. I also sometimes use spray paint. There’s a little bit in Wild Flower Riot. This series I haven’t used it so much, but I’ve really enjoyed that clash between a contemporary material and a subject matter that’s very traditional. I also love the buttery surface.

AMc: Do you buy your paints individually?

MB: Yes, and a lot of them! I have embraced colour a lot more recently, as well. It’s taken me time to conquer it, to find a way that I can work with it. I think that underpainting, that real texture there, reveals itself as you keep looking. Something I have been interested in recently is trying to find some way to visually, in paint, expose my thought process. I looked at Gerhard Richter’s paintings and his “big whoosh”, it’s those slippages that say so much. The paint is sliding across the canvas, it’s coming out at you, and it’s giving you more of a visceral experience. I’m looking back to the likes of Frank Auerbach, who has real depth to his paintings. An event can happen and everybody sees it differently, and I’m trying to somehow visually represent that in paint. With the blurred marks, there might still be some kind of clarity and some crispness, but it’s also slippage, it’s slipping through your fingers, it’s fluid.

AMc: And there’s also still some hint of fragility and ephemerality because of the nature of flowers.

MB: Absolutely. The traditional vanitas; there’s a poignancy to them as well. And I think that’s something to really celebrate, and it’s very relevant now. That’s probably why flowers are so popular, because they poetically encompass what’s going on in the world on a wider scale and how we’re probably feeling below the surface.

AMc: You have touched on what is it about flowers and floral still-lifes that attracts you to them. Can you say anything more?

MB: I think coming from an art history background – my degree is in art history – it was about finding something that I could really explore and get to know. I had an amazing tutor on the Turps course, who told me that I had to commit to one thing, and that is the best advice I have ever been given, because the more and more you go around in circles, the deeper you get into an enquiry, the questions and the understanding. It’s really important to me that there’s a background in history, given my own background and my interests. So, I have the personal history, and then I think it’s quite challenging as a woman to be painting flowers as well. I feel quite subversive. But it’s a subject that is being very much re-evaluated at the moment. There is a huge number of flower shows: two just in East Anglia (Handpicked: Painting Flowers from 1900 to Today at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, and my own). But it still has an association with femininity and women being amateur, men being geniuses, even if it’s the same subject matter. It feels like it’s a challenge because of that; it’s something to get my teeth into and really address. And my paintings are confrontational, they’re in your face, they’re busy, they’re not shy. There are no wallflowers here. It’s taken me a long time to come to terms with that, but I really enjoy the problematics of it, it’s taken me years and years of going back and looking at the history again and again to really understand it. I think this feeds into the paintings: they are open, it’s an enquiry. I’m asking questions. I’m not saying there are definite answers. It’s about exposing the inequalities and questions within the genre.

AMc: Where do you see yourself going next?

MB: I am working on a show for a museum in Amsterdam. It’s early days, but it’s really exciting. It will be different work from Chain of Flowers, but it started with Emily going to Amsterdam, I’m extending that and responding to works over there. Art history isn’t flat or linear. There are all these local pockets to it – and a cyclical element. And that’s what I’m trying to represent, to create some sort of a semblance of within my work. I’m incredibly lucky. I’m absolutely passionate about painting. I’m a complete geek. If I haven’t painted for a few weeks, I get really cranky. The enjoyment of the process definitely comes through in the paintings. There’s a lot of joy, but then there’s a darkness to the subject as well. There’s a process of transformation and becoming. I don’t think anything’s finished. It’s all in a state of flux.

• Miranda Boulton: Chain of Flowers is at Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery until 6 December 2026.

The Box in Plymouth, which contains more than 2m objects, artworks, specimens and archives, has won the Art Fund Museum of the Year 2026 award with a prize of £120,000. For more than 120 years, the Art Fund has advocated for art and culture and the charity has championed museums with the annual prize since 2013. The award’s previous incarnation was the Prize for Museums and Galleries, supported by the Art Fund and administered by the Museum Prize Trust between 2008 and 2012.

The Box opened in autumn 2020, amid the uncertainty of the Covid pandemic. Containing a museum, gallery and archive, it is an amalgamation of a quartet of existing organisations: the Plymouth Museum and Art Gallery, the South West Film and Television Archive, the Plymouth and West Devon Record Office, and the South West Image Bank. It includes St Luke’s, a former church that now contains a space for temporary exhibitions. A public realm has been created outside The Box. Since its opening, the civic museum has attracted more than 1.3 million visitors. It has published a report exploring its social and economic impact, which is accessible on its website.

Capital investment of £48m has enabled the organisations to undergo a transformation while English councils have experienced funding cuts. The Box’s chief executive, Victoria Pomery, said: “Most of that funding came from Plymouth city council and they should be absolutely commended for their ambition in terms of really wanting to build a new organisation at a time when many local authorities were not keen on supporting the arts and culture. And so, after five years, we decided to look at our economic and social impact, and we have really thought a lot about our role as a civic museum, and how can we make ourselves more relevant.”

The judges praised The Box for its ambitious and welcoming approach. The museum was one of five finalists, the others being the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the National Gallery, Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery and V&A East Storehouse. Jenny Waldman, the Art Fund director and chair of the judges, said: “The Box is a revelation in so many ways – a true jewel in the crown of the south-west. In just five years, it has transformed how Plymouth’s remarkable collections are shared and experienced, creating a welcoming space for visitors and reaching beyond its walls into public spaces and almost every school in the city. Its social and economic impact demonstrates what long-term investment in culture can achieve – and is recognised and championed by Plymouth city council.

Studio International spoke by telephone to Pomery, about The Box’s collection, community engagement, environmental initiatives and impact. The following is an edited version of that conversation.

Nicola Homer: The museum holds extraordinary collections, including archaeological finds from bronze age Dartmoor and objects from Ancient Egypt, Asia, Africa and Oceania. Can you tell me about the highlights of the museum’s collection?

Victoria Pomery: There are a lot of highlights … there are things that audiences love to see on a very regular basis, but also, like many museum collections, only a small percentage of the collection is on display at any one time. What I and colleagues are really keen to do is ensure that more of the collection is seen by more people, and that sometimes means looking at items that we don’t know very much about for whatever reason. They may have been gifted to the city, or they may have been acquired, but the documentation isn’t as good as it might be about how those acquisitions were made and might not be very good about the actual objects.

We have done a lot of working with artists, where we invite them to work on an exhibition at The Box, where they also get to look behind the scenes, to look at the collections, and to understand a bit more about what is in the collections, and that has been really helpful to us as an organisation, because those artists come in with a slightly different approach, which might be around decolonial narratives. It might be just a curious request about: “What is that over there on the shelf?” And what we’re committed to doing is making sure that more of our collection is accessible to more people and that really does mean curators really understanding the diversity and the scope of what we have and hold here.

NH: What are the best bits of the current exhibitions on show at the museum this year?

VP: We have opened A Life in Colour, an exhibition of paintings by Gillian Ayres. It’s a survey of her practice – the earliest work was made when she was 16 – through to her work from the early 00s. We also have an exhibition called Echoes of Us, which is a collaboration with the Government Art Collection. We let young people from Plymouth curate an exhibition and bring works normally shown in government buildings, in embassies around the globe, to Plymouth. We also have an archive show, which brings out archival material, paintings, papers and reports about Arts University Plymouth. There has been a Plymouth School of Art, a Plymouth College, in the city for 170 years, and this year marks its 170th anniversary, so we are encouraging creativity and creative thinking in the city.

We have a display linked to the natural history collections, which is focused on Mildred the mammoth, a huge replica of a mammoth that would have been roaming through Devon millennia ago. We also have a display drawn from permanent collections that looks at the port of Plymouth, from early times right through to when the navy first moved into Plymouth, when there was a lot of trading, when a lot of people left to go around the globe from Plymouth, the explorers, the Drakes and the Hawkins.

There is a lot about the history of Plymouth in our permanent galleries to give a sense that Plymouth started out as a really small place and has expanded – it has an amazing waterfront. We have tried to tell the story of Plymouth, and it’s not just one story. There are many stories to be told, because history isn’t just a straight line, it’s much more nuanced and complex, as we know, than this happened, this happened, this happened.

NH: That is a very good point. The Box holds film and photography from the city’s media collections in analogue and digital formats, ranging from the 1890s to the present day. How do the photographs in the museum’s collection tell the story of the city’s transformation?

VP: In the autumn, we are making an exhibition called The Way We Live, which looks at a film of the same name by the film-maker Jill Craigie, who made this incredible film after the destruction of the city in the second world war, thinking about how people should live in the future. This year marks the 80th anniversary of that film and, given that there is a huge desire in the city centre to build 10,000 new homes, we are looking at a show that is all about home and housing, and some of the photographs we have of Plymouth immediately after the war, when the new estates were being built on the edges of the city centre, on the outskirts of the city. We will be using some of that material.

We try to bring photography and film into different exhibitions that we host. We also commission artists to work on moving image films using the film archive. Jordan Baseman, a contemporary artist, has made a film looking at issues around art and emotion, and they are based on excerpts from the film archive, some arm-wrestling championships happening in the West Country. Artists pick up on things that maybe we wouldn’t pick up on because they are curious and they are creative.

NH: The Box has been praised for its impactful community work, such as the wellbeing benefits that it has delivered for the local community. One project focuses on the Windrush generation, people who migrated from the Caribbean during the mid-20th century. What role does the museum play in the life of the local community?

VP: Increasingly, we are playing a bigger role in the life of the local community, I think in terms of thinking about our work with Culture Club, a community group, and the Windrush generation. As an institution, we have been massively helped by communities having knowledge that we don’t have. When, three years ago Culture Club approached us about doing something around Windrush, we said we would be delighted to support them. When they started to research our archive, we found we had three black-and-white images of Windrush people coming into Plymouth and some passenger lists, but we didn’t have as much information as we should have. Members of the community have been able to find information about the thousands of people who came into Plymouth from the Caribbean. We have been working with them. They have been able to find people whose heritage is from the Caribbean, and we have been able to archive some incredible stories that have come to light in the last two to three years.

NH: I can appreciate that The Box is addressing climate change and environmental responsibility. On the website, The Box articulates a mission “to redefine the collections-based institution for the 21st century, expanding its horizons from local to global, placing collections, artists and audiences at its core”. How do you plan to expand the museum’s horizons in today’s digital society on a global scale?

VP: We have had some international partnerships, and they really help. We were commended as European Museum of the Year in 2022. But I think it’s also about how you partner not only with local communities but national and international communities, so all of that partnership working feels really important … In terms of the environment, we know that quite often museums aren’t the most environmentally sustainable institutions, just because of the air conditioning and the systems we have in place to look after and preserve the collection for the future generation.

But I think it’s also how we can talk to audiences and get them to think about what is happening to our world. We had Planet Ocean, a big exhibition/display using items from the collection, about two years ago, and that ran into our time of reflecting back to the Art Fund. But that Planet Ocean show was really to look at how Plymouth has been a specialist centre for marine biology and understanding, and how artists might help audiences to think about climate change and some of the creatures and plants that are now no longer with us, and how we might think about our oceans and how we support them. I think cultural venues become very important places for nature and for telling those stories about the natural world.

NH: I would like to ask you about the funding system for museums in the UK, as I understand that over the last two decades, the British government has reduced state funding for culture and encouraged museums to become more self-reliant. The Box has generated almost £244m for the regional economy and established partnerships with the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery and the V&A. Can you tell me about how you have achieved that economic impact?

VP: It’s about the number of new visitors coming into the city, people’s overnight accommodation, those sorts of things count as economic impact. In building The Box, we had to employ local constructors, which all help build those businesses. There has been a huge amount of economic impact.

In addition, The Box runs its own catering, so our cafe/restaurant is all run in-house. It’s not contracted out. We have had to think carefully about sustainability and resilience long-term, and we run a successful venue hire. We also have a shop that generates some income. We are trying to think about new ways to diversify our income because, as you say, funding in the UK is not easy. Yes, there is public investment, and we still receive investment from the city council, and we also receive investment from the Arts Council England, as well as the British Film Institute. It’s about having a mixed and a diverse portfolio, rather than all one’s eggs in one basket.

NH: The Box works in partnership with three universities. I gather that it is a challenging time for the arts in the higher education (HE) sector. Indeed, the University of Exeter is planning to make cuts in its creative subjects. How are you finding the current funding climate?

VP: The HE sector is having a really challenging time. The University of Exeter is proposing redundancies. The University of Plymouth has already undertaken a similar kind of restructure and has decided, I think with regret, to cut some of its humanities courses. Across the way, our neighbours, Arts University Plymouth, are totally committed to delivering fine art courses – all their courses are creative subjects. We have worked closely with Arts University Plymouth – we are running a joint MA in museum studies. Equally, we work closely with the University of Plymouth (students have a dedicated space here in The Box). There are lots of different ways we work with HE. We have ongoing dialogue with Plymouth Marjon University about arts and education, in particular, and arts and health. But you are right, it’s a very, very difficult environment for HE, with all these cuts.

I think there is something to be said about Britain failing sometimes to value the arts, culture and creativity. We know that they bring so much more. We know that people engaged in the defence industry, people engaged in health, need to be creative. They need to be creative thinkers. Arts subjects are not there just for people to end up being artists. It’s about a whole approach. It’s about curiosity. It’s about understanding the world better and that’s what culture and creativity bring.

NH: Thank you for highlighting the relevance of studying creative subjects. In light of this challenging time for the arts, I would like to ask you how you plan to spend the prize money. How will it make a difference?

VP: To us £120,000 can make a huge impact. What we haven’t yet agreed is exactly how we are going to spend it. But we are very engaged in co-curation and working with communities and so we anticipate it going towards a project that we will deliver, not necessarily in this financial year, but that will span several financial years, because we want to be ambitious, we want to embed what we do properly. There is no point rushing into doing something, but there are some internal conversations to be had. But we are hugely grateful to Art Fund for the prize because it will make a very significant difference to communities in this city at this time. We are delighted to have this money to be able to think creatively about how it’s best used to achieve maximum impact.

NH: Thank you very much. Would you like to add anything?

VP: Well, I suppose the award has given us as an organisation real confidence. We have had so many lovely messages from peers across the country, from our audiences, from communities. We knew we were up against a very competitive shortlist. All the other organisations are fantastic and are all doing amazing work. So, for me, it was a real surprise to be awarded Museum of the Year. I’m absolutely delighted. The whole team is absolutely delighted. The competition was incredibly tough, but I think, having been awarded Museum of the Year has given us confidence. It’s also confidence about a place.

We may be a long way from London, but we are a big city in this part of the world, and the West Country doesn’t just stop at Bristol, it goes on down through Devon and into Cornwall. I think sometimes the West Country suffers from a lack of understanding about its geography and its makeup. I hope that people will come to visit and see what a city in the West Country is like. We would be delighted to welcome any new visitors to the city. It’s got one of the best waterfronts in the world. It’s located between the Sound, which is the waterfront, and Dartmoor. We look into Cornwall, it’s in a really beautiful location and an important location in thinking about defence of the realm.

• Echoes of Us runs until 20 September; Gillian Ayres: A Life in Colour runs until 4 October; and In the Making: 170 Years of Arts University Plymouth runs until 4 October at The Box, Plymouth.