frame 73 - November 2025
The Catching Force
by Cosima Somerset
HV: What drew you to writing THE CATCHING FORCE – could you explain the process?
CS: I have wanted to write a book all my life but I had not written anything except a journal for years. In fact, I kept daily journals consistently, since the age of 11, despite running a business called Concierge in London for over 15 years. This was a lifestyle management service, now called Somerset White. Throughout all my work on this, I had become an expert in problem solving for our clients but it had left not much time for adventure.
However, when I went to on holiday to India for the first time in 2014, by chance I met Father Joe Pereira on the last night. It was a life changing event… MORE
frame 72 - October 2025
The Final Performance
by Gilson Lavis
Standing backstage at the Royal Albert Hall, I felt the familiar weight of nerves settling into my chest. But this time, something else accompanied them—a tingling in my legs, dizziness and fatigue, a sense of tightness and heaviness that had been creeping into my performances for months. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was experiencing the early stages of pulmonary fibrosis. I wasn’t in any shape to be performing, I wasn’t even sure I’d make it to the end of the show alive. Yet here I was, about to step onto the stage one last time… MORE
frame 71 - September 2021
Contamination: A Series of Monologues from Spirit Within the Tower of Babel
I am large, I contain multitudes – Walt Whitman
by Labeja Kodua Okullu
I would like to speak a history; I would like to speak to the present. I would like to
tell the story of a crushing movement from sand / to compact / to towers / to
abodes. I am speaking in such gibberish because I reside in the Tower of Babel… MORE
frame 70 - August 2025
Sophie Dutton interviews Grayson Perry
by Sophie Dutton and Grayson Perry
SD: It’s a landmark moment for Madge Gill’s work to return to the Wallace Collection, a place where she once exhibited in the 1942 ‘Artists Aid Russia’ exhibition. What prompted you to make work inspired by her now, and to include her work within the show?
GP: The fact that she had been in that exhibition in 1942 unlocked my approach to the Wallace exhibition. I’m always hovering up things that influence my work…and a lot of what I hoover up is outsider art. I’ve got an art degree, but in many ways operate like an outsider artist, my creative energy is doing work in that vein. So when I was struggling to respond to the collection in a way that I wanted and heard that she had exhibited at the Wallace I suddenly went, ‘Oh yeah, that’s it.’… MORE
frame 69 - July 2025
Baubles
by Patrick Cash
I spent a few years after graduation listlessly drifting through the office temp world, before landing an assistant producer role at a theatre in Islington. Phil was playing Mercutio in an up-and-coming director’s reimagining of Romeo and Juliet, with Lady Gaga songs interspersed into the Shakespearean verse. I was smitten by his quiff of dark red hair, smattering of freckles and evident commitment to the gym.
At the press night party, I made moon eyes at him from across the room, while we sipped on lukewarm white wine. I assumed he’d be another one of those boys I never quite dared to cross the sacred threshold of conversation with. I was coming out of the disabled toilet when I found Phil next in line. I only managed to say a flustered ‘are you having a good night?’ before he pushed me back in, followed me, and locked the door... MORE
A Tribute to Brian Clarke
Brian Clarke, 2nd July 1953 - 1st July 2025
CHEERIO co-director Harriet Vyner remembers her dear friend, the artist Brian Clarke
“BRI-AN – BRI-AN – COME AND MEET DURCK – HE’S A QUEER TOO!”
Linda Pleasence, shouting to Brian over her friend Dirk Bogarde in the gardens ot La Colombe d’Or Hotel in 1989.
Unusual incidents always happened around Brian and my day would improve immeasurably at the hearing of them. And now no longer. The feeling of loss will only increase over time. His absence seems to illustrate that life diminishes as you get older. Can that be correct? Apparently. The world is already less vibrant without him… MORE
frame 68 - June 2025
Brass Brackish Howl
by Terence Blanchard by his youngest daughter
My father was 3 years old when Hurricane Betsy made landfall. 9 September 1965. I was 5 when Katrina made hers. This August will mark the 20th anniversary of that hurricane and I am contending with how it turned my lung water brackish. I imagine Betsy did the same for my father. That category 4 that surged the lake and flooded the lower ninth. He says all he remembers is someone picking him up and putting him in a boat. I imagine him heat stricken and a little fussy, watching his neighbors wail and wade through the muck. Their skin, slick and glistening. Clothes rippled in the flood… MORE
frame 67 - May 2025
Getting Into The Groove
by Gilson Lavis and Cy Worthington
I became a drummer by mistake. Back in the early ‘60s, when Beat music was the apex of cool, the quickest and most effective way to climb the slippery ladder of social standing, and, more importantly, to impress the ladies, was to play in a group. But the Beat group at my school had about seventeen guitarists and no drummer. The solution was obvious: I would be the drummer. There were only a few, very minor obstacles in my way: I didn’t have a drum kit, and even if I did, I wouldn’t know how to play it.
My determination to join the school band, by whatever means necessary, says a lot about the kind of kid I was. Co-dependency was my first addiction. If there was anything I could do to be more liked by my schoolmates, even by a fraction, I would do it …. MORE
frame 66 - April 2025
Edgewater: 4 February 2024, 6:25 CET (GMT+1), near village Gnojno, Eastern Poland
by Marta Michalowska
I park on a riverbank and try to call the local post of the border guards in the nearby town Janów Podlaski. The call doesn’t go through, and I realise that there is no reception on any of the Polish networks in this spot. I need to select each of them manually one by one to avoid picking up any of the Belarusian providers and incurring ‘the rest of the world’ charges for a virtual trespass across the EU border. I drive off in search of a connection.
I make my way slowly down a dirt track, navigating deep puddles which spill into the riverside meadow. The snow and ice have melted over the past few days as the temperature crept above zero. The landscape around is waterlogged. The hire car skids on the slimy mud, and I switch to the four-wheel-drive mode …. MORE
frame 65 - March 2025
Plastic Crucifix
by Francis Kofi Aidoo
I am in no mood for stupid conversation.
“So, all us man going. Wanno yeah!?”
I kiss my teeth loudly.. I crave silence.
I shut my eyes as though meditating, though I fail to clear my mind. How the fuck did I end up here?
“Ay yo driver, come we move! I don’t wanna be late for dinner!” …. MORE
frame 64 - January 2025
The Kitchen Is The Hangout Part 2
by Labeja Kodua Okullu
His sister and her friends had all just finished Senior High School and were finally allowed to grow their hair out – which meant that extensions, afros, and perms had become frequent subjects of discussion.
He instinctively tuned out their conversation, focusing instead on the water he was cooking the palm fruit with; waiting for it to turn a little less golden, for the sheen from all of the fibres to dull… MORE
frame 63 December 2024
The Kitchen Is The Hangout
by Labeja Kodua Okullu
She was much older now and couldn't sit under the sun for too long. The shelter of palm leaves no longer provided as much shade as she would have liked. She would rather sit inside. She liked the cold tiling on the terrazzo floor on her feet. She liked the comfortable seat she could lose herself in.
Her daughter had married a fancy man. She still called him by that nickname given when she wasn’t too keen: Fancy. Now however, the nickname denoted a kind of adoration: she was grateful for the life he had given her daughter. The life he had by extension, given her…MORE
frame 62 November 2024
Balenciaga On My Mind
by Jane Rankin-Reid
Soon after I arrived in New York in early 1979 I began visiting an elderly aunt living in Connecticut. Growing up in Louisiana’s segregated 1920s, she’d migrated north with her banker husband in the early 1940s. After raising her children in Bedford Stuyvesant and Washington Square in its heyday, the family moved to a restored Connecticut shingle house near Old Saybrook.
As a struggling student living in a damp rooming house on West 21st Street, my aunt’s southern hospitality was irresistible… MORE
frame 61 November 2024
The Power of Dinnerladies Throatquiz
by Austin Collings
This is an album that gives off an impression of unstable hilarity, as if perhaps the two makers of it – Nick Power from The Coral and Mark McKowski one half of The Lost Brothers – have been celebrating their birthdays, alone.
I hear other people in it – Jack Nitzsche, Tom Waits, John Lurie, and the sound of strange neighbours and their strange sounds at strange hours – but naming names won't help us get to the crux of it. And it is an IT. An IT of an album - and not a hit. Career suicide comes to mind, but who has a career in music anymore?… MORE
frame 60 September 2024
Getting Shot
by Francis Aidoo
Getting shot isn't how people imagine it.
For me, it was a relief.
I had been haunted by the scenario in my dreams, like a scene from a movie stuck on repeat. Some nights, I'd make it; other nights not. Staring down the barrel of a gun, I wasn’t so sure that the peace I thought I had grudgingly made with death would last… MORE
frame 59 August 2024
An Interview with Jack Merrett
by Cy Worthington and Jack Merret
CW: At one level, this album’s principal subject-matter is the journey through addiction and recovery, but it’s also about love, and perhaps about some dialectical relation between the two: addiction getting in the way of love, love being a catalyst for overcoming addiction. Some form of resolution seems to be found in the final song, ‘Love Will Find a Way’, which is very affectionate, almost penitential. I wonder whether there was any intention behind that structure?… MORE
frame 58 August 2024
TAKE ONLY WHAT YOU CAN CARRY
by Noel Faucett
How did the exhibition TAKE ONLY WHAT YOU CAN CARRY come about?
I was approached by a friend and gallerist who is familiar with my recent work in Ukraine. The initial idea was to have an art market fundraiser in the courtyard of the gallery site. This idea then evolved very quickly into having an exhibition of my recent work in Ukraine to coincide with the fundraiser… MORE
frame 57 July 2024
Candace Bahouth
Miranda Gold
‘I keep moving,’ Candace Bahouth tells me, ‘I continue.’ Though now settled in Somerset, her artistic exploration has been ceaseless, infusing her work across forms with a highly dynamic energy. Born to a Lebanese-Palestinian father and an Italian mother, she grew up in the US, studying Fine Art at Syracuse University before England ‘seduced’ her; a rich alchemy of geography and heritage, mirroring the diversity of her oeuvre. Celebrated for her intricately detailed woven tapestry, she went on to make needlepoint her focus before concentrating on mosaic. Stitch by stitch, piece by piece, her reverence for each component - ‘a shard of china can be beautiful’ - speaks to both the rigour of her process and the wonder that propels it…MORE
frame 56 July 2024
Praxis, or Why Joan Collins is Important
by Kirsty Gunn
“I want to talk to you about Joan,” Anne said, taking me by the arm and leading me into a corner of the room. This was two weeks ago at a party thrown by a mutual friend to celebrate the publication of her book about historic rose gardens of England. There were roses, of course, everywhere.
“It’s important,” Anne said…MORE
frame 55 July 2024
Queens of Bohemia: And Other Miss-Fits
by Darren Coffield
Queens of Bohemia and Other Miss-fits begins in the 1920s, when the Suffragettes had fought hard for equality and nightclubs became the new social spaces where women could socialise unchaperoned. Kate Meyrick’s ‘43’ club on Gerrard Street scandalised society and inspired the creation of The Gargoyle club, a hunting ground for Femmes Fatales and film stars. This was the age of the dance craze and the arrival of the gender-bending ‘Flapper’ – a flat-chested androgynous-looking female with boyish cropped hair who caused outrage by drinking, smoking and partying…MORE
frame 54 June 2024
An Interview with the Artist Formerly Known as Robert Rubbish
by Will Burns
On one of the first genuinely pleasant evenings of this interminably wintry spring, a street scene plays itself out in West London - a gathering of bohemians and artists, writers, collectors, aesthetes, drunks, former drunks, French House regulars, spies on their down-time, retired actors, mid-rank poets. The assemblage is gathered in and outside James Jackson Antiques, where The Artist Formerly Known as Robert Rubbish has hung his latest exhibition, La Promenade de Venus. The work is distinct to anyone who has known Rubbish’s oeuvre, going back as it does now to his Le Gun days and before - delicate, scratchy pen and ink drawings full of remarkable detail - finely cross-hatched shading, immense planes of patterns rendered in the thinnest of black lines - lino floors, various fabrics, columns, buildings, outdoor vistas… MORE
