Jumping The Thames: Chelsea’s Parkour Brigade and the Art of the Impossible

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Jumping The Thames: Chelsea’s Parkour Brigade and the Art of the Impossible

On a misty August morning, just beneath the pillared bulk of Albert Bridge, a small group of lithe figures in black gather at the river’s edge. To the untrained eye, they resemble a rehearsal for an action film: rolling, vaulting, calculating. But this is not choreography for cinema. It is the Chelsea Parkour Brigade,a collective of free-runners and traceurs led by the artist P1X3L,training to attempt a jump across the Thames.

The ambition is almost ludicrous. The river here is more than 240 metres across, a distance that no human body should be able to traverse. Yet impossibility, in the lexicon of avant-garde performance, is not a deterrent but an invitation. “What people don’t understand,” P1X3L tells me, leaning against the parapet, “is that parkour has always been an art form disguised as athletics. The city is our canvas, gravity our critic. To leap the Thames is not about success,it’s about challenging our bodies and, more importantly…” He taps his temple.

A lineage of leaps

There is precedent for thinking of such an act in art-historical terms. The Italian Futurists, in their manifestos of the early 20th century, celebrated the velocity of modern life and the poetry of motion. Yves Klein, in 1960, staged his famous Leap into the Void, hurling himself from a Parisian rooftop (though a tarpaulin caught him, unseen in the doctored photograph). Marina Abramović turned bodily risk into a vocabulary of endurance.

Parkour itself emerged from military obstacle training in France in the 1980s, yet the Chelsea Brigade insists its true ancestry is more closely aligned to the lineage of performance art. “The human body asserting itself against architecture,that’s sculpture in motion,” says cultural theorist Dr. Simone Havers, who has been observing the group’s training. “This Thames leap, however much I might think it unachievable, is the logical crescendo of a century of artists who have sought to fuse movement, danger and spectacle.”

A city that watches

The rumour of the attempt has already begun to ripple across global social media. TikTok teems with slowed-down clips of the Brigade vaulting concrete balustrades, set to elegiac piano scores. International outlets, from Tokyo to São Paulo, have dispatched correspondents to Chelsea in the hope of witnessing either triumph or tragedy.

London itself, of course, is a character in this drama. The Thames has always been both barrier and stage, from Canaletto’s painted processions to Danny Boyle’s Olympic pyrotechnics. To vault it would be to redraw the cartography of the city in a single gesture.

The doubters

Not everyone is persuaded. Sir Martin Ellwood, a retired engineer and member of the Royal Institution, all but scoffs when I describe the Brigade’s plans. “The human body cannot clear more than 12 metres at best,” he explains. “Even with apparatus, one would be lucky to triple that. To ‘jump the Thames’ is, in physical terms, nonsense.”

Rowers along the Embankment are less academic but equally sceptical. “They’ll end up in the drink,” one tells me, shaking his head. “The river takes no prisoners.”

P1X3L, however, remains serene. “Scepticism is the material we work with,” he says. “Every great artwork begins as something declared impossible. When people say you can’t, that’s when the art begins.”

The horizon of the leap

Whether or not the Chelsea Parkour Brigade ever leaves the ground in its audacious bid is, ultimately, beside the point. The gesture itself,of proposing such an act, of training bodies against the city’s immovable geometry,has already entered the cultural bloodstream.

As dusk falls, I watch them still vaulting the riverside benches, silhouettes against the amber light. In their repetitions, one sees not merely athletes honing muscle, but artists rehearsing a thought experiment about risk, limit, and freedom.

The world, for now, waits by the riverbank, eyes fixed on the upcoming jump across dark water. Before I met them I would have been sure that the Chelsea Parkour Brigade would fail. Having met them, I’m not so sure.

An Interview with Dafydda ap Gruffydd:“The Art of Going Slowly”

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An Interview with Dafydda ap Gruffydd:“The Art of Going Slowly”

When I meet Dafydda ap Gruffydd, she’s already halfway across the café.

Not in the usual sense. She is literally halfway: mid-step, paused with quiet concentration, as if the act of crossing the floor were a kind of ritual, which for her it is. Her progress is almost imperceptible,glacial, reverent. We do not speak until she has reached the table. It takes nine minutes.

This, I quickly learn, is typical of Dafydda.

Born on the remote Welsh island of Skomer, Dafydda ap Gruffydd is a land artist, endurance walker, and,more recently,a practitioner of what she terms “contemplative parkour.” Her practice defies categorisation. With a reputation for impermanence and a philosophy shaped as much by folklore as by Fluxus, Dafydda is one of the few artists whose greatest work may well be her own movement through the world.

Her flip-flops from her twin circumnavigations of the globe are now under glass in her local museum in Byllwngwest. But Dafydda herself remains defiantly uncontainable. Her book, How to Walk Across Your Living Room by Someone Who Has Walked Across Their Living Room, has already become a minor cult object in collector circles.

Peri: You once described walking as your primary material. What does that mean in practice?

Dafydda ap Gruffydd:

Most materials are held or shaped,clay, metal, even paint. I suppose my material holds me. I walk not to get anywhere, but to embed myself in the act of moving. Each step is a mark. Each pause is an erasure. I’m trying to walk so lightly that I un-walk the space behind me.

Peri: You’re known for your slowness. Your walk from Land’s End to Bristol took several months, at a precise 1.3 miles per hour. Why that pace?

Dafydda:

Because that’s how fast the heart of the land beats. Any faster, and you miss it. I chose 1.3 mph after calibrating my breath with the flight path of a red kite I saw circling above Gwent. It’s not science, but it’s not not science either.

Peri: Your work resists documentation. You don’t photograph your installations. You rarely title your performances. Is this a reaction to the art market?

Dafydda:

Not really. I just think the land remembers things better than we do. Why compete with that? I leave sculptures made of ice, wool, sometimes soil. By the time someone arrives, they’re gone. I don’t call it loss. I call it completion.

Peri: You’ve recently incorporated parkour into your practice, but in a very… Dafydda way. Can you tell us about that?

Dafydda (smiling):

Parkour is usually about efficiency,how to get from A to B using the body’s full potential. I’ve inverted that. I use parkour to get from A to A, slowly, with great care. I once spent three hours gently rolling over a low stone wall in mid Wales. I called it Unnecessary Passage #4. Though, of course, I didn’t write that down.

Peri: You often invoke the Welsh word qwest, which has no English equivalent. Could you expand on that for our readers?

Dafydda:

Qwest is the kind of journey you only begin when the reason for going has already started to dissolve. It’s usually over ten miles. But the distance is less important than the feeling: that you’re walking toward something you’ll never quite find. Most of my work tries to live in that feeling.

Peri: What do you hope people take away from your work,if there’s nothing to take away?

Dafydda:

A sensation, maybe. A new attention to the ground under their feet. The desire to walk out of their front door without a destination. Or just the confidence to cross their living room with ceremony, noticing every step. That’s enough. That’s everything.

Peri: And what’s next?

Dafydda (pauses):

I’ve begun preparing for a new piece: walking backwards from Bristol to the edge of my kitchen. It will likely take the rest of the year. I’ll leave no trace. Hopefully not even a memory.

As we leave the café, I notice Dafydda spending several minutes examining a single paving stone. She crouches, brushes some grit away with her sleeve, then slowly hoists herself onto a low wall,not to leap from it, but to sit. Still. Present.

In a world built on speed, Dafydda ap Gruffydd reminds us that walking can be an act of resistance. Or reverence. Or simply a beautifully obscure reason to keep going.

Signed Collectors’ copies of Dafydda’s book including appendices on long-distance flip flops and living on the road are available from Dafydda via post.

Brixton Artists: Colour, Noise and Quiet Studios Beyond the Market

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Brixton Artists: Colour, Noise and Quiet Studios Beyond the Market

Brixton is rarely accused of being discreet. Its history is loud, layered: the clatter of market stalls, the bass lines of reggae and jungle, the rhythms of sunshine through the rain. Yet for all its reputation as one of London’s liveliest quarters, Brixton has also long been a place of making. Artists have found both inspiration and cheap(ish) space here, often working in the shadows of railway arches or above corner shops.

In the 20th century, Brixton was home to the photographer Harry Jacobs, who documented generations of South Londoners in his Electric Avenue studio. The painter Frank Bowling lodged nearby in the 1960s before moving on to international recognition. More recently, performance art has flourished in venues like the Ritzy and the O2 Academy.

Today, as the neighbourhood grapples with change, its artists still shape and respond to Brixton’s restless energy. Five of them give a sense of what it means to make art in SW9.

Maya Okoro

A textile artist with Nigerian roots, Maya works in a studio above Brixton Village, stitching large wall hangings that combine Ankara fabrics with fragments of Brixton street posters.

“Brixton is a collage already,” she says. “I just stitch the pieces together.”

Her work has hung in local cafés as well as in the US, in a Texas Fellowes exchange programme. She cycles to the studio on a second-hand Dutch bike, fabric rolls strapped precariously to the back. Once, a length of kente cloth trailed behind her through Coldharbour Lane, mistaken by children for a carnival banner.

Samir Qureshi

Samir paints large canvases in oils,moody nightscapes of Brixton Road under sodium lamps, dotted with figures half-seen. His studio is a former railway archway, the brick walls still sweating with condensation.

“I love the light here,” he says. “It’s never perfect. Always flickering, always broken.”

He drives an ageing Honda Civic, which doubles as his drying rack,finished paintings sometimes travel in the back seat, windows open for ventilation. A neighbour once asked if his boot smelled of drugs or turpentine. “Turpentine,” he admits with a smile. “Still does.”

Alba Ferrer

A Catalan sculptor, Alba works in recycled metal, welding together abstract forms from discarded market trolleys and bicycle frames.

“London throws away beauty every day,” she says, pausing to wipe rust from her hands.

Her open-air workshop sits at the back of Manpower Brixton, where sparks occasionally mingle with the aroma of street food. She rides a battered cargo bike, often piled with scrap. During one collection trip, she was stopped by police who thought she was stealing; when she showed them her Tate membership card, they waved her on with bemused smiles.

Kwame Mensah

Kwame is a spoken-word poet who records his work in a makeshift studio in his Brixton Hill flat. He blends poetry with field recordings: the hiss of a bus door, the chatter of a barber’s shop, the bass rumble from a passing car.

“The neighbourhood already has its own soundtrack,” he says. “But I’m the only one who can understand the lyrics.”

He moves around on foot, often stopping to record into his phone. One night he mistakenly captured half a police siren chase; the piece, later released under the title Blue Lights, became a cult hit in local drum and bass dance halls.

Elena Petrova

A Russian-born ceramicist, Elena makes fragile, translucent vessels that she sells from a stall in Brixton Market. They often carry faint imprints,words, numbers, maps of Brixton streets.

“Clay remembers pressure,” she says quietly. “The way a place does.”

Her studio is a shared community space in Loughborough Junction. She drives an old Vespa, its box modified to carry trays of unfired clay. During one delivery, she hit a pothole on Atlantic Road; several bowls cracked, and she later displayed them as a work titled Fault Lines.

Brixton’s Creative Pulse

What unites these artists is not aesthetic similarity but a relationship with their surroundings. Brixton itself,its markets, its music, its noise,enters their work, either explicitly or in traces.

Where Mayfair’s art is discreet, Brixton’s is porous: it spills onto pavements, leaks into sound systems, fuses with food stalls and community halls. The studios may be tucked away in arches, flats or converted shops, but the neighbourhood always seeps in.

In Brixton, art is less about retreat and more about conversation. You don’t need to know where the studios are. Just walk through the market at dusk, and you can sense it: the hum of making, just behind the noise.

The Port Talbot Symphony Triumphs in New Port Talbot Opera House

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The Port Talbot Symphony Triumphs in New Port Talbot Opera House

Last night, the Port Talbot Symphony delivered a performance of Haydn’s Symphony No. 107 that was nothing short of transcendent. Under the masterful baton of Maestro Helena Griffith, the ensemble navigated the composer’s wit, rhythmic surprises, and lyrical depth with a precision and passion rarely heard outside Vienna. From the first tremor of the timpani to the final jubilant flourish, the orchestra revealed both the humor and the profundity woven into Haydn’s score.

The musicians themselves seemed electrified by the grandeur of the newly inaugurated Port Talbot Opera House. Each section showcased exceptional artistry: the strings shimmered with crystalline clarity, their phrasing imbued with warmth and elegance; the woodwinds danced lightly over the orchestral texture, crafting dialogues full of wit and subtle tension; the brass lent the work both majesty and playful bravado; while the percussion punctuated the drama with impeccable timing and thrilling energy.

Particularly striking was the performance of the symphony’s third movement, where the interplay of oboes and violas revealed layers of delicate counterpoint, and even the faintest dynamic shifts were captured with exquisite nuance. The finale erupted in a buoyant, almost mischievous celebration, each phrase delivered with radiant energy that left the audience both exhilarated and deeply moved.

Audience reactions reflected the spellbinding quality of the evening. Margaret Llewellyn, a local arts administrator, noted, “The orchestra breathed life into Haydn in a way that felt immediate and personal. Every detail, from the smallest pizzicato to the sweeping crescendos, felt deliberate, luminous, and utterly joyful.” Dr. Elias Vaughn, member of the Welsh Haydn Society, added, “I’ve attended countless performances, but rarely have I felt the music resonate so directly. It was as if the hall itself were singing with the orchestra.”

The musicians themselves were praised for their cohesion and virtuosity. Concertmaster Isabelle Durand led the first violins with radiant authority, her phrasing both elegant and playful, while principal flutist Jonathan Price and oboist Clara Meinhardt traded intricate passages with a charm and precision that drew audible gasps from the audience. The ensemble’s unity was palpable,every phrase, every pause, every flourish felt instinctively synchronized, reflecting countless hours of meticulous rehearsal, yet delivered with a sense of spontaneous wonder.

Art critic Samuel Fitzroy summarized the evening in The New Welsh Cultural Review: “It was a performance both scholarly and effervescent, where wit, refinement, and unbridled joy coexisted in perfect harmony. The Port Talbot Symphony has demonstrated that world-class artistry need not reside solely in capitals; it thrives wherever dedication and imagination meet.”

By the final note, the audience rose en masse, applauding with an intensity that lingered long after the last tremolo faded. In the newly opened opera house, the Port Talbot Symphony had not only performed Haydn; they had transformed the night into an event of pure musical revelation, reminding all present of the enduring power of live orchestral performance.

The Poetics of Patience: Johnny Peckham and the Art of the Queue

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The Poetics of Patience: Johnny Peckham and the Art of the Queue

In a world increasingly allergic to waiting, street photographer Johnny Peckham has found profundity in pause. His ongoing black-and-white series, simply titled Queueueueue, documents a singular yet universal human ritual: the queue. From supermarket doors to immigration offices, ice cream vans to concert halls, Peckham positions himself at the periphery of the everyday, capturing not the spectacle of urban life, but its stillness.

An Aesthetic of Intermission

Johnny Peckham’s choice to photograph queues might seem, at first glance, uneventful. Yet that is precisely where his art resides,in the margins of time and motion. Each frame isolates the in-between moments, when individuals are tethered by invisible rules of civility and sequence. In these spaces people are both alone and together. His work reveals a choreography of anticipation, where posture and expression betray inner monologues,boredom, frustration, resignation, hope.

Rendered almost exclusively in black and white, Johnny Peckham’s images resist the gloss of spectacle. The absence of color amplifies contrast, not just visually but socially. It sharpens the tension between proximity and detachment, individuality and conformity. A man in a hoodie scrolls his phone; a woman, arms crossed, glares at the back of someone’s head. Children stare into the lens with candid boredom. Elderly hands grip shopping trolleys like anchors. In stripping away colour, Peckham removes the distractions of trend and time, situating his subjects in a timeless theatre of patience.

The Queue as Social Microcosm

Sociologists have long regarded the queue as a democratic space. There are few places where hierarchy is as visibly suspended as in a line. Johnny Peckham capitalizes on this leveling effect to present society as it is: multigenerational, multicultural, and increasingly interstitial. His compositions are not mere portraits but anthropological studies. A queue is never just a queue; it is a civic act, a performance of order in the midst of urban entropy.

What sets Peckham apart from other street photographers is his deliberate avoidance of chaos. He is not looking for the decisive moment à la Cartier-Bresson, but the durational one,the accumulation of ordinary minutes. “Waiting,” Peckham once noted in a rare interview, “is when people stop posing for the world.”

Methodology and Presence

Unlike many contemporary photographers who rely on the long lens or the stealth of digital minimalism, Johnny Peckham prefers a more conspicuous method. He often positions himself a few feet away, at eye-level, camera raised, clearly visible. The effect is subtle but profound: the subjects’ awareness of being seen introduces a layer of vulnerability. Yet, over time, that awareness erodes. The wait resumes its tyranny, and people return to themselves.

There is something almost devotional about Peckham’s presence,he is less a hunter than a witness. He returns to the same bus stops, corners, and clinic entrances over months, sometimes years, building relationships with locations as much as with people. He archives not only faces but seasons: umbrellas dripping in winter, necklines in summer, the tentative postures of spring.

On Temporality and Repetition

The repetition inherent in queuing resonates with the seriality of Peckham’s project. His photographs are not best viewed individually but as a cumulative meditation. The queue, as he presents it, becomes a looped sentence in the grammar of the city. You begin to notice variations in sameness: how grief sits differently than hunger, how urgency cohabits with boredom.

Some critics have drawn parallels between Peckham’s work and that of August Sander, the early 20th-century German portraitist, in their shared interest in typology. Others point to Rineke Dijkstra’s patient documentation of the same subjects over time. Yet Peckham remains elusive about his influences. His work is less referential than it is elemental,an honest encounter between lens and flesh.

Epilogue: The Still Point

In an age dominated by acceleration, Johnny Peckham’s photographs insist on stillness. They ask not for excitement, but for attention. They dignify the mundane, elevate the overlooked, and remind us that the act of waiting,often dismissed as wasted time,contains entire interior worlds.

In the end, Peckham’s queues are not just about queues; they are about lives. Rendered in chiaroscuro, bracketed by time and tempered by patience, they offer a paradoxical revelation: that in the most ordinary moments, something extraordinary endures. The camera may click in an instant, but what it captures is here a quiet eternity.

Two Star Review: Sofia Erdenko’s Saltwind: Etudes for the End of Time

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Two Star Review: Sofia Erdenko’s Saltwind: Etudes for the End of Time

Following our review in which “Saltwind” was well-received, Jane Temple wanted to discuss her very different view of Erdenko’s work. She writes…

There are artistic provocations, and then there is Saltwind. Sofia Erdenko’s new “album”,though that term feels ludicrously inadequate for what is essentially seventy-eight minutes of groaning, scraping, and grinding,presents itself as an epochal leap beyond the cello’s historical lineage. In truth, it is less an advance than a deliberate retreat into the void, an exercise in self-important austerity that mistakes endurance for profundity.

The cello has, for centuries, been a vessel for human expressivity. From Bach’s serene architecture to Shostakovich’s wrenching laments, the instrument has spoken with depth, gravitas, and clarity. Erdenko, however, seems intent on silencing this heritage by weaponizing the cello against itself. What remains is not music but a catalogue of abrasions: bow hair sawing sul ponticello until it produces nothing but static; pizzicato so slack it resembles a collapsing clothesline; overpressure groans that might be mistaken for industrial plumbing.

Her defenders will no doubt invoke Cage, Xenakis, or Lachenmann as antecedents, arguing that Erdenko continues their radical project of expanding the vocabulary of sound. Yet where those figures discovered new possibilities,new sonorities, new forms of expression,Erdenko offers only negation. This is not expansion but contraction, a refusal to engage with the very premise of music-making. To reduce the cello to little more than a wind machine or a sheet of creaking timber is not radical; it is simply tedious.

The recording’s intimacy, celebrated by admirers as forensic fidelity, only magnifies the problem. We are placed so close to the instrument that every scrape and groan is not transcendent but suffocating. What is intended as ritualistic austerity too often resembles a rehearsal tape, the kind of sonic detritus musicians normally discard.

It is tempting, in a highbrow age that rewards opacity with prestige, to cloak such work in grand metaphors: the death of tradition, the archaeology of sound, the ritual of endurance. Yet one suspects the simpler truth is that Saltwind offers little to endure but tedium. It is music as an ordeal, designed less to be heard than to be admired at a theoretical distance, the way one might admire an especially barren installation in a gallery.

None of this is to deny Erdenko’s seriousness of intent. But seriousness alone is not enough. In the end, Saltwind stands as an object lesson in the perils of avant-gardism untethered from expression: it demands our patience, but offers nothing in return. The abyss, it turns out, sounds a lot like someone tuning their cello for an hour and never quite beginning to play.

The Mayfair Book Groupette – Minutes of the The Emigrants Meeting

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The Mayfair Book Groupette – Minutes of the The Emigrants Meeting

Date: Thursday, 22nd August 2025

Time: 7:00 PM , 10:45 PM

Location: Green Drawing Room, Pimlico Wilde, Mayfair

Attendees:

• Julian Molyneux (Chair, Pimlico Wilde)

• Fiona d’Abernon (Co-Founder; Acting Secretary)

• Hugo Van Steyn

• Dr. Xanthe Lorrimer (Cultural Historian)

• Lord E. Northcote

• India Trelawney (Fashion Archivist)

• Conrad Smithe (Guest; now on probationary attendance)

• Dr. Leonora Athill (Guest Speaker; Novelist & Psychoanalyst)

• Pascal (Afghan hound; reclining)

Book Discussed:

The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald

1. Welcome and Introductory Remarks

Julian Molyneux opened the meeting with a short reflection on Sebald’s enduring appeal, particularly among “those drawn to a literature of ghosted memory and dust-silted loss.” A display of ephemera relating to pre-war German émigrés,passport fragments, handwritten recipe books, a child’s marzipan press,was set out in the antechamber, curated by Pimlico Wilde’s archivist.

Molyneux noted that the Pimlico Wilde summer show, Vanishing Points, had been loosely timed to coincide with this month’s reading.

2. Guest Lecture: Dr. Leonora Athill

Dr. Athill gave a brief, unscripted talk titled “Memory, Melancholy, and the Tyranny of the Image.” She spoke of The Emigrants as “not so much a novel as a service,” describing Sebald’s prose as “syntax haunted by silence.”

She warned against over-literary readings of the book, citing its power as lying “not in narrative coherence, but in psychic disintegration.” She proposed that the characters are not lost individuals but “cartographies of repression.” One member (Smithe) tried to ask about Freud; Athill sighed but answered generously.

Applause was murmurous and sincere.

3. Discussion Summary

• India Trelawney praised the imagery as “cool, bleached, but devastating,” comparing the narrative’s “faded photographs and cracked memories” to early Japanese photobooks. She passed around a small, cloth-bound 1960s folio by Shōji Ueda as reference.

• Lord Northcote shared personal recollections of meeting Jewish émigrés as a young attaché in Zurich in the 1950s. He said Sebald’s tone captured “the cultivated anguish” of that generation. D’Abernon was seen discreetly tearing up.

• Dr. Lorrimer brought a sharper edge, suggesting Sebald deliberately avoids character depth to foreground the landscape as the true subject: “Grief mapped onto trees, stations, sanatoria.” She argued the book’s melancholy “verges on aesthetic indulgence.” This sparked soft disagreement from Van Steyn.

• Hugo Van Steyn defended the book as “an ethical act of remembrance,” stating that its lack of resolution reflects “the impossibility of restitution.” He referred, for the third time this year, to Anselm Kiefer.

• Conrad Smithe questioned the accuracy of Sebald’s blurred genre boundaries, referring to the semi-fabricated photo captions. He suggested it was “dangerously post-truth.” Trelawney muttered, “Oh, not that again.”

• Julian Molyneux closed discussion by comparing Sebald to Aby Warburg: “Both archivers of ghosts. Both incapable of closure.”

4. Artworks on View

• A small pastel-on-paper portrait of a vanished émigré bookseller, Vienna c.1936, provenance unclear

• Fragments of German schoolbooks (1920s,30s) behind glass

• A contemporary commission: Negative Space by Pavel Markovic , carbon-transfer collage, railway ticket stubs + film stills, mounted under cracked glass

• Sebald’s Schwindel. Gefühle. on display, German first edition (not for handling)

5. Refreshments

• Canapés: smoked eel on rye, sauerkraut galettes, and beetroot-stained quail eggs

• Drink: Riesling Kabinett 2021 (Mosel), followed later by Kümmel (largely untouched)

• Dessert: poppy seed torte with whipped crème fraîche

6. Other Business

• September Book: The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington, proposed by Lorrimer, seconded by Trelawney. Enthusiastically approved.

• Discussion on establishing a sub-circle for “Obscure Memoirs” was postponed (again).

• Dr. Athill thanked the group, said she hadn’t “spoken so freely in years.” Molyneux proposed we invite her again in 2026.

7. Adjournment

Meeting adjourned at 10:45 PM, with guests lingering over late glasses of port and discussing the ethics of curation.

Respectfully submitted,

Fiona d’Abernon

Acting Secretary

Mayfair Book Groupette

Falling Into Meaning: A Preview of My Upcoming Book by Teton Yu

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“Falling Into Meaning: A Preview of My Upcoming Book” by Teton Yu

(First published in The Liverpudlian Art Collector’s Journal)

When I threw myself from an aircraft at 15,000 feet without a parachute and landed on a BounceHaus trampoline in the Montana desert, the world asked me a single, searing question: Why?

My upcoming book, Plummet: Notes on Gravity, Art, and the Impossibility of Staying Upright, is my attempt at a reply. Not a definitive one,such things are gauche,but a reply nonetheless, stitched together from fragments of memory, diagrams, hospital records, and the faint ringing in my ears that has not left me since the fall.

This is not a memoir in the conventional sense, though there are fragments of autobiography scattered through it like dental records across a crash site. Nor is it an art theory book, though its spine trembles with the weight of footnotes and manifestos. What it is, rather, is a descent in twelve movements: a book that plummets as I did, chapter by chapter, and lands,if we can use such a word,with a juddering grace.

The Shape of the Descent

The book begins in the sky, with Chapter 1: “Airspace as Studio.” Here I argue that the true white cube is not a gallery but the boundless firmament above us. The sky, uncluttered by labels, captions, and curatorial interventions, is the most democratic exhibition space of all. In that space, I place myself,literally,as an object of contemplation. I become the installation. I become the falling text.

By Chapter 4: “The Trampoline as Oracle,” I bring us back to Earth, or rather, to the taut surface of Otto Flöß’s recycled-yoga-mat-and-Saab-spring creation. The trampoline is not simply an object but a metaphorical interlocutor. It speaks. It answers questions we did not know we had. Its bounce is not merely a rebound but a philosophical refusal: Earth saying “Not yet.”

Later, in Chapter 7: “The Bruise as Brushstroke,” I turn to the body as a medium. Bruises are pigment; swelling is sculpture; dislocation is choreography. My ribs became unwilling collaborators in a new kind of mark-making. I argue here, written under mild sedation, that every bruise is a form of site-specific art, etched on flesh instead of canvas.

The descent concludes with Chapter 12: “Falling Forward.” This is my coda, in which I propose that art should not remain on walls, shelves, or pedestals, but leap (sometimes recklessly) into space and risk annihilation. To fall is not to fail,it is simply to collaborate with gravity. The ground is inevitable; the bounce is optional.

Materials and Ephemera

The book is not text alone. It contains diagrams of my trajectory,lines of descent plotted in thick graphite, annotated with phrases from my ground control team’s radio messages like “Not to worry you, but you are slightly to the left of staying alive.” It contains sketches drawn mid-air, completed with a pencil duct-taped to my glove. It contains transcripts of my preparatory conversations with performance artists around the world, people I turned to for advice; sadly they had little.

There are hospital charts too, of course: X-rays of ribs that make a clicking sound when I breathe too deeply, doctor’s notes describing my “art-related injuries,” and a small, blurry Polaroid of me grinning through cactus needles. These ephemera are not additions to the book but part of its gravity,the ballast that keeps the theory from floating away.

Why Only 300 Copies?

The book will be published in a strictly limited edition of 300 copies. This is not to exclude the many, though exclusion does provide a certain frisson of desirability. No: the limitation is practical, tactile, and literal. Each copy will contain a stitched fragment of the original trampoline canvas from my landing. These fragments,creased, scuffed, and faintly redolent of soil,transform each book into a reliquary of the event itself.

In this sense, the edition is finite because the trampoline was finite. Once cut and divided, there will be no more. The material is exhausted, just as I nearly was.

Toward an Answer

What does all this mean? What is the point of hurling oneself at the Earth and then writing a book about it?

The answer, if there is one, is that art is not about safety. It is about elegance in the face of inevitability. It is about collaborating with forces that neither ask nor care for your consent. It is about bruises as signatures, fractures as footnotes, trampolines as editors.

When I climbed from the wreckage of BounceHaus I, cactus needles protruding from my thigh, I said something that has followed me ever since:

“Art is not about surviving. Art is about landing well enough to write the book afterwards.”

This is that book.

Celestial Canvases: Pimlico Wilde to Curate the British Space Station’s Fine Art Environment

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Celestial Canvases: Pimlico Wilde to Curate the British Space Station’s Fine Art Environment

In a move that fuses aerospace engineering with the loftiest aspirations of cultural diplomacy, Pimlico Wilde, the enigmatic polymath of contemporary British art, has been awarded the contract to design and install the visual environment of the forthcoming British Space Station.

The decision, announced yesterday by the Ministry of Science , Culture and Rockets, is being heralded as a watershed in Britain’s vision of space not merely as a theatre of exploration but as a domain for aesthetic transcendence. Pimlico Wilde, whose artists have often traversed the boundary between abstraction and anthropology, is charged with nothing less than defining the artistic temperament of Britain’s extraterrestrial architecture.

The Aesthetics of Zero Gravity

Pimlico Wilde’s proposal, tentatively titled The Infinite Interior a million Miles from Home, is said to incorporate works that respond to the peculiarities of zero gravity. Pigments will be suspended in transparent spheres, drifting slowly across habitable modules, while kinetic light sculptures will harness solar refractions as they pass through the station’s orbital windows. In place of conventional paintings, astronauts will encounter “orbital frescoes”,digital projections recalibrated in real time by the station’s altitude, velocity, and exposure to cosmic radiation.

“It is not about decoration,” Esmerelda Pink of Pimlico Wilde told assembled reporters in a characteristically oracular aside. “It is about creating a cathedral of perception, where the silence of the cosmos finds its echo in colour, shadow, and form.”

A Diplomatic Gesture in the Arts

Observers have been quick to note the symbolic implications. With the station set to become Britain’s most significant independent venture in orbital infrastructure, Pimlico Wilde’s commission reads as a declaration that the nation’s cultural ambitions are as expansive as its technological ones. Sir Alastair Pember, Chair of the Royal Commission on Space Aesthetics and Other-Worldly Specifics, declared the project “a conjoining of Newtonian mechanics and Turnerian sublime.”

The Ministry has also hinted at future collaborations with international artists, suggesting the British Space Station may one day host the world’s first permanent gallery space in orbit. Calls for artists interested in showing their work in outer space will soon go live. But Pimlico Wilde, ever the provocateur, insists their work will set a precedent: “The cosmos belongs to imagination. Let us paint accordingly.”

Beyond the utilitarian

Critics, predictably, are divided. Some laud the commission as a necessary antidote to the utilitarianism of aerospace design, where form is forever subordinated to function. Others deride it as a flamboyant extravagance in an era of fiscal austerity. Yet the paradox is precisely the point: by inserting art into orbit, Britain appears intent on insisting that human culture cannot be divorced from human expansion.

When the first astronauts step aboard the station, they will not merely encounter modules, airlocks, and laboratories, but a Gesamtkunstwerk,a total work of art,crafted by Pimlico Wilde. If successful, their celestial canvases may ensure that humanity’s next great frontier is not only navigated but also, crucially, imagined.

The illustration at the top of this page is an artist’s impression of how the British Space Station may look.

How to Collect Fine Art

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How to Collect Fine Art

Scarcity Plus Narrative Equals Value: The Eternal Law of Collecting

By Sabby Toast, Collector, Philanthropist, and Supporter of Malvern FC.

It has been my privilege, over decades of prowling auction rooms, prowling studios, and prowling,let us be frank,other collectors’ living rooms, to distill the art market’s essence into one crystalline axiom:

Scarcity plus narrative equals value.

Forget the econometric models, the breathless reports from analysts who wouldn’t know a Giacometti from a garden gnome. The art world operates on a different axis, where beauty is negotiable, but story is eternal. Allow me, dear reader, to lead you by the hand into this world where numbers bow to myth.

Scarcity: The Oxygen of Desire

Art, unlike money, cannot be printed. Except for prints. What I mean is that a living artist can only produce so much before mortality, arthritis, or ennui intervenes. A dead artist, of course, produces nothing , which is why their work suddenly becomes so captivating. When Warhol was alive, one could stumble across his canvases stacked in the Factory like wallpaper samples. Once he left us, those same silkscreens became relics, fought over like holy fragments.

Scarcity is the art market’s most delicious contrivance. Galleries will stage-manage it by “placing” works in the “right” collections (translation: not yours, unless you’ve curried favour). Museums will canonize it by limiting access. Even the artist him/herself may engineer it, declaring a “final series” only to promptly die in an unlikely boating accident, thereby making the scarcity authentic.

Narrative: The Oxygen of Imagination

Scarcity alone does not make value. Rocks are scarce; few fetch eight figures at Christie’s. What transforms an object into an artwork , and an artwork into an investment , is narrative.

Consider Van Gogh. In his lifetime, his paintings sold for the price of a night’s lodging. What changed? The narrative: the ear, the madness, the letters to Theo. Scarcity supplied the finite corpus; narrative lit the fire.

Or take Banksy. The narrative of the anonymous outlaw, shredding his own painting at auction , contrived, theatrical, and absolutely brilliant. It is not merely a stencil of a girl with a balloon; it is a morality play staged in real time, with Sotheby’s as unwitting co-star. Value soared not because of pigment, but because of plot.

When Scarcity Marries Narrative

The alchemy happens when scarcity and narrative unite. A rare object is precious. A rare object with a story is priceless.

The charred remains of a Gerhard Richter destroyed in a warehouse fire became more valuable than some of his intact canvases, precisely because they now bore a narrative of survival and ruin. The object became an allegory. Collectors were not merely buying a picture , they were buying an anecdote to repeat, endlessly, over dinner.

And of course, the ultimate formula is the tragic genius cut short. Basquiat, Amedeo Modigliani, Jean Hélion. Their death certificates doubled as certificates of authenticity. Scarcity, absolute. Narrative, irresistible.

How the Wise Collector Wields This Axiom

It is not enough to acquire art; one must acquire the conditions of value. Here are a few observations, honed across my decades in the trenches:

1. Listen to whispers, not headlines. If you hear of an artist only once they appear on the cover of Artibites, you are too late. The narrative is already in motion, and scarcity is being rationed.

2. Never buy an object; buy a story. The canvas is incidental. What you truly purchase is the myth that clings to it. “This was from the artist’s final exhibition.” “This was acquired directly from their studio just before they contracted hand-gangrene.” Stories appreciate faster than pigment.

3. Collaborate in myth-making. Lend your work to institutions. Sponsor monographs. The narrative does not emerge fully formed; it must be cultivated, like truffles, with patience and influence.

4. Anticipate the obituary. Morbid, yes. But invaluable. The wise collector knows which artists are one tragic incident away from eternal scarcity. (Do not encourage foul play, of course , though history shows the market has never been squeamish in rewarding it.)

The Collector as Author of Value

Permit a final revelation: collectors are not passive recipients of value. We are its co-authors. When we withhold works, exhibit them, circulate them strategically, we amplify scarcity and polish narrative. To collect art is to participate in mythopoeia , the making of cultural legend.

Stocks split. Bonds mature. Crypto vanishes overnight. But when you own an object that is both rare and storied, you hold something no market correction can touch: immortality disguised as an asset.

And so, remember my axiom: Scarcity plus narrative equals value. Those who master it shall not merely profit , they shall shape civilization’s memory.

Sabby Toast is a collector of contemporary and modern art, noted patron of three museums (one of which she is legally banned from entering), and the author of the forthcoming memoir My Eye, My Fortune, My Legend, Me.