frame 53 May 2024
Nanny Lightfoot As She Wasn't
by E Kiem
Some things that are known about Jessie Lightfoot are almost certainly true: that she was born in 1871 in the West Country; that she moved to Ireland to look after the children of Captain Anthony Edward Mortimer Bacon; that she spent her last twenty years in London, most of them living with Captain Bacon’s prodigal and prolific son; and that she died there, aged eighty, her biography a latent legend… MORE
frame 52 May 2024
My time as a Turner Prize Judge
by Greville Worthington in conversation with Cy Worthington
Cy Worthington: Tell me about how you ended up being a Turner Prize juror and your life in the art world up to that point.
Greville Worthington: At the time I was on the acquisitions committee of something called the Patrons of New Art, an initiative where supporters of the Tate donated a small amount of money each year that went towards buying an artwork for the Tate’s collection. One of the works I acquired was Matthew Barney’s Ottoshaft, a very astute purchase because then he was a relatively unknown artist. I think because of that I caught the eye of Nick Serota (then Director of Tate). I’d also been involved with the Henry Moore Foundation in Leeds and had started curating exhibitions at Saint Paulinus in North Yorkshire, and felt there was an attempt to get jurors who were based all over the country, not just in London… MORE
frame 51 April 2024
Belonging Elsewhere
by Jane Rankin-Reid
In the beginning of our late 1970s downtown lives, my generation of young artists, writers and performers made many nocturnal discoveries; situational sentiment, lost innocence, gossip, mystery, objects and ideals. My New York memoir, The Colour of Night, written in a series of three notebooks, began with my unexpectedly vivid recollections of a late 1980s summer evening stroll through the darkened city streets with a pair of artists. Everything radiated from the rediscovery of that precious time of casual ambling. Winding our way through the night, we sensed New York’s dormant potency, relishing in its temporary emptiness and the relief from its hungry necessities for those few short hours… MORE
frame 50 March 2024
Insalata della Strada
by Flora Blissett
‘Do NOT eat the mushrooms!!’ ‘Have 999 keyed in if the girls eat the foraged omelette!!!!’ ‘Please text to let us know you’re alive after eating the mushrooms!!’
My mum has no faith in my foraging. Anxious texts and replies to my Instagram stories flood my phone screen as I document the culinary exploits of my day off with two friends. Working a season at a café on the Isle of Skye, we take this springlike autumn day off for a long walk to and from Macleod’s Maidens. It has become habit on these weekend excursions to bring a Tupperware or little zippy-bag with us. Just in case – the likely case – we see some things to forage. Gorse flowers (smelt as soon as seen in equal power, their bright yellow spilling into the very air as coconut and almond), plantain (its long, narrow leaves swelling towards their end. A common site on school playing fields, often considered a weed but in fact brews a delightfully antibiotic, albeit bitter, tea), wood sorrel (clover’s pinewood-shade-coveting doppelgänger), lady’s mantel (brew a tea with this to alleviate menstrual cramps). And, as my mum blanket-terms them, ‘mushrooms’…MORE
frame 49 February 2024
Revolting Women! - How I became a Neo Naturist
by Wilma Johnson
In 1981 I took a photo of Christine Binnie flashing in Soho. Forty years later, it is hanging in the Tate Britain’s exhibition Women in Revolt! Art, Activism and the Women’s Movement 1970-1990. In a way, it is ironic to be received with open arms by such a pillar of the establishment in honour of my work as an anti-establishment provocateur, but I’ll take it.
There’s a whole wall of paintings and photographs of my performance art group the Neo Naturists, and the flashing one is right in the centre… MORE
frame 48 February 2024
The Homeless Mind
Clare Conville in conversation with HelenA Pritchard
Clare Conville – What inspired you to call the exhibition ‘The Homeless Mind’?
HelenA Pritchard – I took the title from a book by Peter and Brigitte Berger called Anxieties in Society.
CC – What themes from the book did you find so compelling?
HP – It was less to do with the philosophy of the overall book, but more the way they propose oppositions, particularly between city and nature… MORE
frame 47 January 2024
Belonging
by Francis Aidoo
I have brief snatches of memories from my childhood in Accra, fragmented pieces of an unfinished puzzle laying strewn across my mind that only when looked at from a distance begin to form an image of my life. Until the age of seven, I had only known one mother, one home, one name, Kwame. I had no idea I belonged to anyone or anywhere else in the world. There was no desire for the duality that would be forced onto me. I had no need or want for a new name that would be more acceptable - that would allow me to fit in easier… MORE
frame 46 December 2023
Luce di Trieste
by Matilde Cerruti Quara
I rustle through the pages of a tiny poetry collection I’ve been eager to read. Flip flip flip. Words go by as if looking out the window on a train. My mind is elsewhere. It is the opening line to a title-less poem that finally catches my eye.
It recites: Where do you come from ?
Trieste is unique. It exists on a double frontier: between countries as well as between elemental forces. Proudly facing the Adriatic Sea, where a mysterious world of rocks and subterranean caves meets the expanse of water that is the big blue. Accessible only via high coastal roads, carved into the Karst Plateau… MORE
frame 45 November 2023
Grandad - A tribute to Barry Cryer
by Ruby Cooper
It’s been a year and a half since I said goodbye to the funniest man in my life; my grandad, Barry Cryer.
There are so many things I could talk about but I’ll keep it short and sweet, (something he never did – there was always one more joke…) He and my Grandmother Terry were always in my life – from my babyhood onwards. Some memories are too far back to recall but when I was very little my mother, actress and singer Jack Cryer, did the musical interludes with Colin Sell for a show that Grandad used to do with Willie Rushton… MORE
frame 44 October 2023
Wells Tempest and Rita Nowak in conversation
by Maude Martel
Maude Martel: How do you define your art style and how has it evolved over time?
Rita Nowak: I work with staged photography that is painterly in its composition and creation. Initially when I left art school in 2004 I created tableaux vivants (living pictures) –with direct references to old masters. Today these references fade into the background and establish an implicit art historical knowledge and reference.
Wells Tempest: My style is taken from a variety of artists and artistic movements that I admire and that have influenced me over the years. In my early teens, I was very taken with Cubism and Futurism; Picasso, Braque, Boccioni, along with Delaunay were big influences, as were Leger and le Corbusier. Later, I became interested in the Bauhaus school and Art Deco design and architecture… MORE
frame 43 September 2023
Bacon and Philosophy: The Art of Transience
by Ben Ware
Peering into Francis Bacon's oeuvre is a troubling experience.
What are we to make of the mutilated faces, the bulging and contorted bodies, and the large fields of colour which enframe the figures? The paintings are clearly important – each exhibiting a certain sublime aura – but how should we read them? Can these disquieting images even be read at all?
The artist himself had much to say about the ideas behind his image-making… MORE
frame 42 August 2023
Fascists
by Simon Bill
I saw a post on Facebook once that said ‘People who claim they are “not interested in politics” are, basically, neo-liberals’. I’m not interested in politics myself, but I don’t generally mention it because I know it might get that kind of response, and I understand why – it’s often true. Airy indifference masking a secret allegiance to the status quo. But me saying ‘I’m not interested in politics’ (if I ever said it out loud) would just mean that I’m not one of those people who are interested; they really enjoy reading about it and talking about it and so on, even when they don’t need to. To me it’s like thinking about utility bills or whatever. So, crucially, I will think about it when I have to; and, lately, I have had to. In Dover I have encountered fascists and (in some ways worse) apologists for fascists. People ready to make excuses for fascism. Some are people I thought I knew… MORE
frame 41 August 2023
with Becky Harrison and Kandace Siobhan Walker
Becky Harrison: Why did you call the collection Cowboy?
Kandace Siobhan Walker: It’s named after a poem in the collection. It’s not like a “cowboy” cowboy, it’s more a cowboy in the sense that my little sister never had to unload the dishwasher when she was a kid because she was the youngest which always pissed me off, but then when I would go visit my nan, I was her youngest grandchild, so my cousins would be like, ‘Kandace doesn’t have to do anything and she gets her own room in your house!’ and I’d just be chilling on the porch like, ‘Well… it is what it is’.
BH: You’re the cowboy there?
KSW: Exactly. I’m the one who’s allowed to transgress… MORE
In Conversation
frame 40 July 2023
by Miranda Gold
Molly’s grandmother, Hazel, was congealed to the worn brown velvet armchair in the front room on Sunday evenings.
Hazel may have been as immured to the armchair as the framed moths and butterflies were to the walls, but as eye-witness I can only account for the hours before I was picked up from Molly’s, the two of us flopped on our bellies, feet up in the air, ankles crossed, faces inches from the TV screen, willing the second hand to stop ticking.
Imprisoned lepidoptera and mute, brandy-sipping grandmothers aside, Molly’s house was everything I imagined a home should be: quiet, snug, ordinary. To hear the doorbell was a certain kind of agony. To peel myself off the orange squash sticky carpet and away from Molly predicted an ache that would be drawn out till the next week. Anxiety of departure, anticipation of reunion; a curious prelude to first love… MORE
Chrysalis
frame 39 July 2023
An Interview
with Hugo Hamper-Potts
Primarily self-taught, British artist Hugo Hamper-Potts was inspired by his father to paint, and has since featured in exhibitions at Cob Gallery, Studio 3 and elsewhere. In both his landscapes and his portraiture, his work is ebullient and familiar, playful and earthy, capturing the kinesis, the stillness, and the essence of life itself.
CHEERIO had the pleasure of sitting down with Hugo and asking him some questions about his practice… MORE
frame 38 June 2023
Blue Eyes and a Wild Heart
by Jane Wellesley on Dorothy Wellesley
‘In 1936 W. B. Yeats cited my grandmother as having written “perhaps the most moving philosophic poem of our time”. Yet by the time she died twenty years later, Dorothy Wellesley had become invisible to the public, and isolated from her family. I was five when she died, yet she never met me, or saw me. As I grew up, she was rarely talked about, and, in a house that was filled with family photographs, there were no images of her. Gradually it became clear that even in death she was not a welcome presence, that she had been exiled. Of course I became fascinated by her, precisely because of this alienation. Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson were among the very small group of people to attend the interment of my grandmother’s ashes. ‘I feel how wasted that fierce little life was and how little anybody cares,’ Harold wrote in his diary. This book is my attempt to redress that view.’… MORE
frame 37 June 2023
The Colour of Night: An Exclusive Extract
by Jane Rankin-Reid
It was a humid evening in August, late 1980s, and we couldn’t stop talking about the summer light as we made our way to David Bowe’s studio on West 29th. Our three silhouettes, inked and lengthened on the empty streets, bodies intermittently lit by blazes of streetlight, leaked then of colour in that sticky nighttime gloom. We’d eaten at The Odeon, smoking throughout an entire meal of steak frites and beer, bathed in the air conditioning. Downstairs, in the mirrored anteroom outside the bathrooms, the redolent smell of New York restaurant basements: industrial-strength insecticide, stale ashtrays, scraps of uneaten food. There were chairs stacked patiently against the walls down there, as if awaiting a future party… MORE
frame 36 April 2023
City Racing
by Keith Coventry
Around the age of nine or ten I enjoyed Saturday morning children's cinema at the art deco Odeon in Burnley. Squeezed between films of The Three Stooges and Flash Gordon I would watch another type of film showing high-spirited youngsters from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea exploring and constructing dens inside huge boarded up houses on Exhibition Road, making plans to regroup at the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens should anything go wrong… MORE
frame 35 April 2023
Getting Glassy Eyed with Francis Bacon
by Travis Elborough
Francis Bacon first saw Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein’s Soviet agitprop movie about the failed first Russian revolution, in 1935 and ‘almost’ as he later maintained to David Sylvester, ‘before’ he’d ‘started to paint.’ The ‘almost’ is a typically Baconite fudging of at least five years’ worth of painting at that point, nearly all of which he later destroyed, erasing practically everything he produced prior to about 1944. But the importance of the film to his subsequent output can hardly be underestimated… MORE
frame 34 March 2023
It’s so hard to love your neighbour, man
by William McNamara
Marseilles now is like New York in the seventies.
You can eat cheap pizza by the slice and watch rats chase each other through the trash, which is inescapable and everywhere. Parts of town are tangibly slimy underfoot. All of the graffiti is anti-something: anti-anything. One author-vandal in my neighbourhood hates a convenient short term rental platform but has clearly never seen the name written down. On the walls around our building, you can read RBNB OUT and RBNB KILLS THE NEIGHBOURHOOD. Much of the graffiti is woven around cut-and-paste style posters advertising DIY gigs. Every band plays an unimaginable genre, communicated in inscrutable code… MORE
