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Total Jollocks: Hackson Unleashed at Pimlico North

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Independently reviewed by Artimus Crankshaft

It takes a special kind of genius to do what a child might accomplish during a tantrumic episode and pass it off as avant-garde. Enter Hackson Jollock, the UK’s latest artistic wunderkind, who has given up paint and instead taken up the noble tool of the modern visionary: Microsoft Paint.

Pimlico North Gallery in the Shetlands, currently the northern-most contemporary art gallery in the English-speaking, European world, is usually a quiet haven for modest sheep sculptures and mildly expensive oils of lighthouses. It has however thrown open its doors to Jollock’s latest show, “Ctrl+Z My Soul”. And what a show it is , walls groan under the weight of vast canvases digitally run up with pixelated splatters, languorous curves and jagged squiggles.

Each piece, with titles like “Existential Yoghurt”, “WiFi Signal at Sea”, and “Untitled (Because I Forgot)”, seems to capture the raw emotion of a man who once saw a Rothko painting in a pub quiz photo round and thought, “There’s nowt to this art game, I must get a studio.”

Gallery-goers are greeted first by “Giraffe Panic in RGB”, a work that resembles a printer dying mid-seizure. It sets the tone for the show , chaotic, confusing, and somehow sticky despite being entirely digital.

There is something uniquely brave about printing a JPEG at 300% resolution until the pixels beg for mercy, then charging £109,000 for it because it’s “a commentary on the digital self.” One canvas simply reads “ERROR: FILE TOO LARGE” in Comic Sans, which I found both moving and disturbingly accurate.

At the opening, the gallery’s curator, Winifred Blossom though clearly exhausted was trying to hold onto her usual optimism. She described the show as “an exploration of what happens when the boundaries of art and tech collapse into a heap of JPEG compression artifacts.” When asked if the pieces had sold, she muttered something about “NFTs”, “most pieces have been sold”, “prices start at £100,000” and began quietly gnawing at her lanyard.

Opinions are divided. Depending on who who you talk to, Hackson Jollock is either a terrible fraud or a visionary prophet.

Either way, his work demands attention , certainly artistic, possibly medical. I laughed. I cried. I commented to Winnie that I felt there was something of a resemblance to the work of American artist, Jackson Pollock. She said she couldn’t see it herself, and she was fairly certain Hackson had never seen Pollock’s work, so any similarity was merely coincidental.

Normally I would give this show 3.5 out of 5, so that is what I will give it.

Hackson’s show is on for another three months at Pimlico North.

A Pachydermal Union: Elephant Polo’s Power Merger Shakes West London

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by Venetia Shrugge, Society Correspondent

In a move that has sent shockwaves through the worlds of equestrian absurdity, inherited wealth, and animal-assisted social performance, the Fulham Elephant Polo Club and its age-old rival, the Chelsea Elephant Polo Club, have officially merged. The historic deal,brokered, some say orchestrated, by the flamboyant art dealers at Pimlico Wilde,brings an end to decades of passive-aggressive trunk-based competition, illicit peanut sabotage, and politically ambiguous club newsletters.

The newly formed entity, known grandly as The United Pachydermal League of West London (UPLWL), promises “a new era of tusk-forward diplomacy, couture saddle design, and highly stylised mahout choreography.”

For decades, the two clubs have vied for dominance on and off the pitch, their games more known for their vintage champagne intermissions and bitter marital subplots than actual goals. Fulham favoured Burmese elephants with names like Clarissa and Lord Tumbles, while Chelsea preferred the sleeker Sri Lankan breeds with controversial ankle tattoos. Tensions came to a head last summer when Fulham’s mascot,an animatronic baby elephant named Sir Honks-a-Lot,accidentally trampled a Chelsea gin tent, resulting in what one witness called “an unspeakable loss of tonic.”

Enter Pimlico Wilde: part-dealer, part-mischief-magnet, and full-time patron of causes that confuse customs officers. Best known for staging the first Carl Abbit retrospective on a Thames houseboat a spokeswoman for Pimlico Wilde said that they saw in the elephantine rivalry “not just a sporting feud, but an underutilised cultural performance space.”

Esmerelda continued, “I just thought,why not collapse the distinction between competition and collaboration, polo and pageantry, proboscis and postmodernism?” As she lounged beneath a parasol shaped like a Warhol banana while sipping something suspiciously opalescent. “Besides, I had far too many embossed saddle blankets in storage.”

The merger has produced immediate results. The inaugural match of the newly minted Grand Tusk Cup was held last Sunday at Battersea Park, featuring an all-elephant orchestra playing the Blue Danube, and team uniforms designed by a blindfolded Tracey Emin.

Reactions from club members have been mixed. Lady Featherstone-Chard, former chair of the Chelsea club, voiced concerns: “The Fulham elephants are frightfully over-sauced and lack basic awareness of luxury brand etiquette.” Meanwhile, Fulham stalwart Giles de Cleft countered, “The Chelsea beasts refuse to charge unless there’s a scent of truffle in the air. It’s frankly un-British.”

Still, the art world is thrilled. Rumors abound that Pimlico Wilde plan to stage a halftime performance art piece called Trunk Call, where Grib Abramović will silently stare into an elephant’s eyes for three hours, possibly while being gently swung by a crane.

With bookings already flooding in from confused diplomats, rogue art collectors, and three different Argentinian Polo scouts, the future of British elephant polo,once a curio of the deeply wealthy,has never looked brighter, or more artistically avant-garde.

Membership of the United Pachydermal League of West London is currently closed to new applicants unless, as Esmerelda notes, “you can prove a deep understanding of both Jean Baudrillard and the West Indian* Elephant Polo Rulebook.”

*Here West Indian means West Indian, not West Indian. ie- from West India, not the Caribbean.

The Ergonomics of Screaming: Parquet Fontaine at the Nice Museum

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by Anselm Pepto

Parquet Fontaine doesn’t make art so much as threaten it. His latest exhibition, Soft Objects for Hard Feelings, now staged across three non-contiguous rooms at the Nice Museum, is a study in discomfort,both ergonomic and existential. The sheer strangeness begins at the door, where visitors are greeted by a brightly painted intern offering mouth guards.

Fontaine, who rose to cult prominence after being ejected from the 2019 Venice Biennale for attempting to install a functional trampoline beneath the Hungarian Pavilion’s suicide installation, continues his inquiry into the violent intersection of mid-century design, unresolved childhood trauma, and contemporary conditions like gluten intolerance. He insists his practice is rooted in “accidental function”: objects that neither work nor completely fail, but hover in a permanent state of ethical hesitation.

At the heart of the show is Chair #0 (My Mother, My Algorithm), a fully upholstered screaming apparatus shaped like a Modernist chaise lounge with inexplicable antlers. It emits an irregular tone Fontaine calls “emotional tinnitus.” Made from materials including recycled juicing mats and loosely braided horsehair, the piece invites the viewer to recline in theoretical comfort, only to release a pungent waft of despair.

Across the gallery, Email to Dad (Unsent) takes the form of a 14-foot sofa filled with shredded tax forms and mounted on four gently vibrating pedestals. It hums softly in Latvian. Fontaine has said the sculpture “represents the slow buffering of forgiveness,” though I am at a loss at how exactly this is the case.

The walls are dotted with smaller works, including Ergo-Fascism I-IV, a series of IKEA instruction manuals annotated with deeply personal footnotes in crabbed handwriting. These are displayed under cracked sheets of resin labeled with fragments like “don’t sit like that, it’s what made you this way” and “remember: the stool is not your father.”

Curator Minerva Dent calls Fontaine’s work “an urgent response to the over-optimized present.” She gestures toward Standing Desk for the Emotionally Seated, a rotating podium of salt and chalk dust that periodically dispenses espresso beans into a child’s sneaker. “He’s interrogating postures of power,” Dent explains, “and also the legibility of ergonomic failure as an archival impulse.”

Reactions have been predictably divisive. A local paper labeled the show “a cry for help.” Sales in the gift shop have been sluggish, but this was to be expected when the gallery was forced to admit that none of the items are dishwasher-safe. Fontaine, for his part, remains elusive. When approached for comment during the opening, he described his work as “a minor intervention in my own visibility,” which confuses as much as it elucidates.

Still, Soft Objects for Hard Feelings is hard to forget. Whether it is performance, sculpture, or one man’s slow descent into furniture-based madness, Fontaine has built a space where the unsit-able becomes the unforgettable.

Review- Bleeding Edges: The Surreal Plumbing of Elva Quirk

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In a decommissioned Red Hook Amazon warehouse turned “post-industrial anti-space,” Elva Quirk’s latest solo exhibition, Gutter Liturgy, oozes with a mischievous conceptualism that makes collectors and curators nervous. The show, composed mainly of disconnected plumbing fixtures connected to AI-generated Gregorian chant loops, can be seen as a radical act of eco-catharsis.

Quirk describes herself as a “hydro-existentialist with trauma-resistant leanings.” After briefly attending the University of Helsinki’s unaccredited “School of Conceptual Art,” Quirk relocated to Bushwick, where she co-founded the ephemeral performance collective Bleach Baptism (2017,2018), best remembered for its site-specific protests against linear time and gymnastics.

Her current body of work, comprised of installations with titles like “Pipe Dream in E Flat Minor” and “Lady Faucetta”, explores what Quirk calls “the innate spirituality of drainage.” Central to the exhibition is Plumb Divine (2024), a four-foot-tall copper U-bend suspended in a vat of artisanal broth. Every seven minutes, the structure emits a low gurgle,said to be a digitally slowed-down sample of Quirk’s childhood dog barking at a hat. The piece appears to interrogate the relationship between domestic sanitation and something akin to repressed dlonging.

“What’s important,” says Quirk in an unscheduled artist talk she delivered to a disoriented tour group from Ohio, “is not what the pipe is draining, but who. I’m draining myself, constantly. This is my confession booth. But for greywater.”

The exhibition is curated by Randle Nuxx, former DJ and current head of curatorial programming at the nonprofit space Spoil. Nuxx insists that Quirk’s work “confronts the infrastructure of belief with the believability of infrastructure,” adding that he hasn’t used traditional plumbing in four years.

Critics have been divided. The Swindon Occasional called Gutter Liturgy “an important reminder that pipes, like dreams, can burst at any moment.” The Monthly Arsonist praised Quirk, although finished with a backhanded compliment, thanking her for “reminding us that art is best when it smells faintly of mildew.”

One cannot deny Quirk’s impact on the post-pandemic art landscape. In a time when most artists are turning inward or going digital, she dares to go downward,deep into the aesthetic sewers of the subconscious.

Gutter Liturgy runs through July 17 at Spoil Gallery.

Related Articles:

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• Fungus as Metaphor: A Roundtable with 8 Mould-Adjacent Sculptors

• DIY Turner Prize Winning Kits and Other Critiques of the Market Economy

The Hedge Fund Art Diaries #5

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Back in Shoreditch. Sunburnt.

What. A. Week. I’ve just sold a piece for multi-millions!

We’ve just returned from our “reconnection sabbatical” in the Maldives , my wife Arabella’s idea. She said I needed to “log off and look at something that wasn’t a screen or a bottle of Dom Pérignon.” Rude, but not inaccurate.

I spent ten days trying to digitally sketch the feeling of a coconut falling in slow motion. It was trickier than I expected, though eventually it made a wonderful series of thirty-five pieces filled with movement. Arabella spent ten days drinking rum out of a pineapple.

Anyway, glorious news: I’ve sold yet another piece. Yes. Sold. For millions, of actual money, not crypto. My piece Existential Surge Pricing , a looping 5-minute animation of a Tube map projected on the face of an actor dressed as Mozart playing Fat Boy Slim bass lines on a harpsichord , was bought by a hedge fund art collective in Berlin for £3,212,000.

I almost wept. Arabella did weep. Our Airbnb host also wept, mostly because I was celebrating by repeatedly yelling “ART WINS” into a conch shell at 3 a.m. I promised not to do it again, it was just the emotion.

Naturally, I spent the proceeds wisely and with great maturity. Specifically, the next day I purchased a 1996 Formula 1 car once driven by Jean Alesi , my childhood hero and the only man to ever make a moustache look aerodynamic. It’s dangerous what the internet allows us to buy at the snap of a finger or a press of a RETURN button.

The car now sits in our Shoreditch loft, between my VR headset shrine and a deconstructed beanbag I call Post-Comfort. Arabella says it’s “utterly pointless and smells like petrol,” but I told her it’s heritage on wheels.

Do I have a driver’s licence? Yes. Do I have any intention of driving it? No. I just sit in it with a glass of wine and whisper, “Jean, we did it.”

My next project is already underway. It’s called Late Stage Rebranding. It features a live feed of the Bank of England’s homepage slowly being taken over by a rainfall of animated avocado toast. It’ll be priced at £4,305,000 – I imagine the governor will snap it up.

Life is good. Until next time…

#Bemorecreative

Hedge Fund (digital artist, retired finance deity, F1 car sitter-in-er)

Pimlico Water: A New Chapter in Global Art Gallerism Sets Sail

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In a daring union of connoisseurship, maritime elegance, and curatorial vision, Pimlico Water debuts as the world’s first privately commissioned floating art gallery aboard a fully refitted Damen SeaXplorer 75. This singular vessel,a triumph of Dutch engineering and discreet luxury,ushers in a new epoch of cultural mobility, where masterpieces are no longer static, but carried to the farthest reaches of the world.

Conceived and financed by British art gallery Pimlico Wilde and steered by an internationally respected curatorial team, Pimlico Water defies the boundaries of traditional exhibition-making. Works by canonical figures such as Agnes Wibb, Frank X, and Louise Franken are shown alongside emergent voices from places as wide-ranging as Dakar, Seoul, Tbilisi, and La Paz,many of whom will be seen in dialogue for the first time. The inaugural exhibition, Unmoored Perceptions, considers the ocean as both subject and metaphor, weaving together media from 1960 to the present. Sculptures are set against horizon lines. Works on paper breathe in the shifting quality of maritime light.

The gallery “Pimlico Water” is both a commercial enterprise, and a floating salon. How destinations are chosen is not published, but the current list suggests a mix of well-known art centres a combined with those that the art world has historically bypassed: coastal towns, remote islands, and river ports. At each anchorage, the gallery will host salon-style evenings with local artists, scholars, and collectors. “It’s very exciting,” Captain Suitt commented. “We have a new opening party at every destination!”

The cost of maintaining Pimlico Water is commensurate with its ambition: estimated in excess of £180 million, inclusive of acquisition, retrofitting, and global operations. Pimlico Wilde have stated their intent clearly: to chart a new, more generous geography for art,one not tethered to auction blocks or art fairs, but to the slow, luminous logic of the sea.

Pimlico Water begins its maiden voyage this July, departing from London after a huge private view in St Katherine’s Dock. Its first year will take it to the Azores, Cape Verde, Saint Helena, Patagonia, and onward to Polynesia. At each port, it will offer the local collectors rare encounters with significant artworks.


A preview of Baltic Light: The Hidden Origins of Impressionism

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Before Monet, There Was Maalima: Walta Bryce Rewrites the Brushstrokes of History

by Ianthe Small

In what is certain to either ignite a fierce academic feud or force the Musée d’Orsay to reprint several thousand wall labels, art historian Walta Bryce is preparing to release her most ambitious (and, some say, impish) work to date: Baltic Light: The Hidden Origins of Impressionism. In it, she makes a case so dazzling and audacious that one almost forgets to check the footnotes. Her thesis? That French Impressionism was not, in fact, born on the banks of the Seine, but in the lilac-scented meadows and long twilights of 19th-century Estonia.

Before you scoff (as, admittedly, I did), consider this: what if Monet’s famously flickering waterlilies owe their very shimmer to the boggy reflections painted thirty years earlier by obscure Estonian artist Kaarel Maalima? What if Pissarro’s pastoral scenes were essentially well-funded echoes of landscapes already pioneered by Anu Kask, whose brushwork, according to Bryce, “makes Sisley look like a man painting with a sponge in a storm”?

Bryce, long admired for her scholarship on overlooked Baltic movements, has built a reputation for finding big narratives in forgotten places. In Baltic Light, she suggests that the aesthetic DNA of Impressionism,its palette, spontaneity, and obsessive study of fleeting natural light,first bloomed not in Paris, but in what was then the Governorate of Estonia, under Russian Imperial rule and persistent drizzle.

“I’m not saying Monet stole Estonian Impressionism,” Bryce insists in her typically crisp prose. “I’m saying he encountered it, adapted it, and then let the Parisian critics declare it new. Meanwhile, Estonian artists were too busy drying their linen canvases near the samovar to file international patents.”

Chapter two is a particular highlight: “Maalima and Monet: Parallel Visions, Uneven Fame,” which includes side-by-side reproductions of Monet’s Haystacks and Maalima’s earlier Põllukuhjad at Dusk,the resemblance is uncanny. The brushwork, the handling of mist, even the gently absurd decision to paint the same thing fifteen times under slightly different weather conditions all suggest that someone was reading someone else’s exhibition catalogue.

Bryce also unearths letters (previously untranslated from Old Estonian cursive) in which Kask describes her “rapid method of capturing snow without painting snow,” a technique strikingly similar to what Monet would later call “the effect of light upon whiteness.” Coincidence? Bryce archly leaves the reader to decide, though her footnotes carry the distinct tone of an eyebrow raised in victory.

What elevates the book above a simple nationalistic reclamation project is its wit. Bryce writes with the amused detachment of a scholar who has endured decades of departmental pushback and survived them by becoming more erudite and more entertaining. Her aside on Degas,“the only Impressionist allergic to the outdoors”,is worth the price of admission alone.

The final chapters, dedicated to why Estonian Impressionism failed to achieve international renown, are sobering. She cites a lack of galleries, limited transport links, and the Estonian temperament,“too modest to declare themselves geniuses, too busy chopping firewood to market a movement.”

Still, the legacy, Bryce argues, remains. In the luminous glints of morning dew on birch leaves, in the refusal to polish a painting into submission, in the idea that the act of seeing is itself worthy of art,Estonia was not following Paris. It was leading, quietly.

Baltic Light: The Hidden Origins of Impressionism is expected to provoke controversy, admiration, and at least one exhibition in Tartu. As Bryce concludes with typical understatement: “History is not written by the victors. It is written by the French. But every now and then, the light falls somewhere else first.”

Am I persuaded? No, not at all. But it is an interesting read, even if ultimately it proves us persuasive.

A Certain Light: Contemporary Tendencies in Northern Croatia

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Reviewed by Dr. Ianthe Small

There’s something gently subversive about holding a contemporary group exhibition in a town that appears, at first glance, to contain more storks than artists. And yet here, in the quietly cobbled town of Ludberg,“the geographical centre of Croatia,” as the locals remind you with a certain pointed pride,an ambitious and impressively coherent group show has emerged, a exciting murmuration of ideas adding to the deep history of Croatian fine artists.

Titled A Certain Light, the exhibition gathers nine artists from across the region (and one inexplicably from Dundee) in a former textile warehouse that now functions as the town’s cultural centre, badminton court, and, food festival venue. The show is loosely themed around light,as metaphor and medium ,and curated with an understated East European confidence.

One enters through a low arch, past a disarmingly large sculpture by Ivana Vrček: a chandelier made entirely from shattered rear-view mirrors, titled Memory is reversible in theory, but in practice it’s not so easy. Hung just slightly too low for comfort, it sets the tone,confrontational, yes, but perfumed with humour and a wink toward Balkan nostalgia.

Hrvoje Blagojević’s video installation Sun Over Lidl Car Park, Osijek runs on an ageing television mounted atop a tower of bricks, as though awaiting demolition. The piece documents the shifting light on a supermarket roof over the course of a single day. It’s meditative, yes, but also lightly mocking,especially when paired with a soundscape that includes gently looped announcements from the self-checkout machine and a dog barking in precise three-four time.

More tactile is Thread Horizon by Marina Mesić, a wall-length textile piece stitched from discarded school uniforms and fishing net. From a distance, it resembles an abstract coastal landscape; up close, it becomes a palimpsest of childhood, domestic labour, using the precise shade of teal that featured in soviet swimming pools and associated with every soviet child’s state-sponsored swimming lessons. One viewer described it to me as “beautiful and slightly itchy, like my grandmother’s love.”

Several works show a shared distrust of traditional media. Tea Novak’s contribution is simply a lightbulb hanging over a bowl of plum jam, left to ferment throughout the exhibition. Viewers are invited to write down how the light made them feel and drop the notes into the jam. As a performance piece it lacked something, but over time it became my favourite piece.

But the show’s quiet triumph is its collective tone. There is no shrill moralising here, no shouty placards or over-processed trauma. Instead, these works whisper, suggest, imply, and often smirk. It’s a show that understands its place,both geographically and psychically,on the edge of something. The artists seem aware of the northern light, of history’s long shadow, and of the small daily absurdities of provincial life.

Is it a show that will rewrite the map of European contemporary art? No. But that’s rather the point. A Certain Light proves you can be both provincial and perceptive, local and lucid. In a time when major cities are choked with oversubscribed fairs and algorithms disguised as aesthetics, Ludberg’s modest warehouse hums with actual thinking.

Why My Abstract Images Cost So Much

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By Aline Croupier MFA, BFA, GCSE (Art)

There are questions artists learn to accept, like a dull ache in the knee or England losing on penalties.

“Did you mean to do that?”

“Is it upside down?”

And of course, the perennial favourite, spoken with the furrowed brow of someone who once saw a Picasso tea towel:

“But why does it cost that much?”

In this article I shall attempt to clarify why my abstract images, which often feature “just some shapes” are, in fact, correctly priced. If anything, they are scandalously underpriced.

1. You Are Not Paying for What You Think You Are

To assume one pays for canvas and paint alone is like assuming a Michelin-starred meal can be priced by the kilogram. The work is not just the object. The work is also the years spent studying colour theory until ochre becomes a personality trait. The sleepless nights wondering whether ultramarine is sincere or just showing off. The 1,427 hours I have spent defending abstraction to dinner party guests with smart dental implants and strong opinions on Tracey Emin.

My paintings are priced not just as images, but as intellectual and emotional artefacts. They are weathered battlefields of meaning,rife with brushstrokes, broken rules, and metaphorical (and sometimes actual) blood and tears.

2. Historical Precedent and the Curse of the Rectangle

Historically speaking, abstraction has always been misunderstood until someone pays a fortune for it. Kandinsky was mocked, Rothko was told his work was “too sad for hospitals,” and Agnes Martin was once asked by a collector if she had made a mistake. Now, we treat these canvases like religious relics.

And yet I, standing in this noble lineage, am questioned by men in tight trousers suggesting they might be interested if I lower the price.

Let us be clear: abstraction is not randomness. It is not the absence of structure. It is a rigorous distillation of emotion, movement, memory, and formal tension into form,sometimes barely visible, but unmistakably deliberate.

Yes, it’s a rectangle. So is the Mona Lisa.

3. My Materials Are Actually Quite Expensive

That pale blue you see? It’s made from hand-ground pigment sourced from a remote Italian supplier who has not updated his website since 2007. That gold foil? Ethically sourced, ruinously fragile, and seemingly designed to stick to everything except the painting. The varnish? Imported, obscure, and behaves like a temperamental nobleman when exposed to humidity.

And then there’s the studio rent, the archiving, the insuring, the courier fees, the inevitable therapy bill when someone says the word “decorative” in the wrong tone of voice.

4. Time Is Not Money. Time Is More Expensive.

There are pieces I’ve worked on for months,layering, scraping, painting over, listening to Mahler while doubting the very concept of yellow. Some are finished in hours, but only after years of arriving at the precise economy of gesture required to stop. Abstraction is not laziness. It is restraint. Ask any artist: it is infinitely harder to know when to stop than when to begin.

You are not paying for the hours it took to make the work. You are paying for the years it took to know how.

5. Scarcity and Emotional Risk

There are not many of my works. And yet the market rarely considers the value of emotional risk. Each abstract piece is a gamble: not everyone will understand it. Some may openly dislike it. One gallerist said one of my works looked “like Matisse had created it,” which I liked, until he added “after a head injury,” which I felt tipped over from art criticism into ill-mannered rudeness.

Every canvas I make is, essentially, a kind of personal stake in the cultural lottery. The price includes this quiet wager: that the future may look back and say, “Ah, now we see what she was doing.”

Conclusion: They Should Cost More

In sum, my abstract images cost so much because they are rare, intellectual, emotionally charged, historically situated, and more finely tuned than they appear. They are not décor. They are not mood boards. They are visual essays written in gesture and colour.

In fact, upon rereading this article, I am forced to admit: my works should cost more. I shall be adjusting my price list accordingly.

Fine Art Exhibitions I Have Seen This Month

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By Willia Partridge

As a long-time devotee of the lesser-seen corners of the art world, I make it a point not to set foot in any gallery where the Prosecco is cold and the press release contains the words “dialogue” or “mark-making”. I travel instead to the cultural tundra beyond the big cities, to the church halls, repurposed post offices, and – more and more – unused multi-story car parks.

This month, I found myself meandering through England’s more overlooked postal codes in search of the truly unusual,the exhibitions so off-grid they’d give Artforum a nosebleed. And I was richly rewarded.

1. “Marmalade as Medium” , Upper Little Binton Village Hall

Curated by Mrs Pamela Gorringe (retired librarian, accidental avant-gardist), this one-room show featured fifteen local artists all working exclusively in Seville orange marmalade. Some painted with it, some sculpted it, one woman simply left it in jars atop mirrors to “reflect the sticky duality of time.” The smell was formidable.

Standout piece: Spread Thin, a 6-foot canvas painted entirely with spoons. An allegory for British local politics, according to the accompanying information panel.

2. “Cows I Have Known” , The South Fenland Livestock Pavilion (Gallery 3)

Yes, Gallery 3 is technically an unused sheep pen behind the actual livestock arena, but there was undeniable charm in this solo exhibition by agricultural painter Donny Weft. Every canvas depicted a different cow he has brought up and then taken to market.

My favourites were Enid (2004,2008), a brooding, chiaroscuro Holstein rendered in very broad brush strokes, and Geraldine, Who Stared at Me Once Through a Gate, a triptych executed entirely in mud.

The gift shop sold fridge magnets and udder-shaped soaps.

3. “Quiet Ferocity: The Embroidery of Geoff Trimble” , St. Dymphna’s Community Centre, Exmoor

A revelation. Geoff, a former dentist with a penchant for geopolitical satire, is one of the up and coming stars of British fine art embroidery. His enormous, twelve-panel work NATO: A Tapestry of Disappointment features Theresa May, a stoic dormouse, and a rather beautifully rendered Croatian missile.

Viewers are encouraged to sit on bean bags and contemplate the collapse of multilateral diplomacy in thread. The local WI made lemon drizzle cake for the opening, which was, frankly, excellent.

4. “The Inner Life of Potatoes” , A shed in Wrexham

This one I found through a WhatsApp group entitled Feral British Art. Access was by appointment, and the artist,known only as KEV,met me at the gate wearing what I can only describe as a skin-coloured boiler suit.

Inside: six oil paintings of potatoes. Each haunting. Each inexplicably human. I wept. The painting high in the eaves glared at me with the intensity of a disappointed uncle. KEV insisted on playing a soundscape of root vegetables being harvested.

5. “Unseasonal Landscapes” , The Tourist Information Centre, Malmesbury

A delightful show of traditional oil landscapes,snow in August, bluebells blooming beneath pumpkins, a July thunderstorm, and fourteen images of one field at different times of the year. The artist, 92-year-old Norah Willet, told me she painted only what she felt the weather ought to be, not what it is. She ran out out of white paint halfway through the series, but that only added to the charm. I say she should get the next Turner prize.

I left with a small print of Snowman at a Summer Barbecue, which now hangs proudly above my fireplace.

In conclusion, while the capital may drown in curated white-walled gloss and large-scale installations involving ash or ennui, the real soul of contemporary British art thrives elsewhere,in sticky jars, sheep pens, potato sheds, and the stalwart back rooms of community centres.

As for me, I’ll be continuing my search next month in Northumberland, where I’ve heard rumour of a performance piece involving mime and several boxes of celery.

Until next time

W