by an anonymous artist

A month has passed. The studio smells faintly of linseed oil and sunshine. The doubts I hung so neatly on the hook last time have not disappeared, but they’ve begun to dry around the edges, curling slightly like old newspapers in a Florence heatwave. And while I’m no closer to certainty, I find myself less agitated by its absence. Which, I suppose, is what we call progress.

Last month I asked whether art mattered. The question hovered like a fruit fly in a glass of wine: hard to ignore, impossible to remove elegantly. I’ve since had several emails, a few raised eyebrows, and one earnest postcard from someone in Devon urging me to “return to the joy of pure form.”

This month, a shift,not in grand conviction, but in tone.

I spent the past few weeks working on a piece I can’t yet name. It began, as most of my work does, with something not quite working. A canvas that had gone dry too fast, a composition that refused to settle, a shape that frankly, looked smug. I stared at it, it stared back. Eventually, out of exasperation more than inspiration, I painted a crooked line through the middle.

And there it was: not a solution, but a route.

There’s something deeply unfashionable about admitting pleasure in the process. It’s supposed to be about ideas ,sharp, critical ones, preferably expressed in footnotes*. But I’ll confess: I like the feel of a brush dragging against linen. I like the moment when a surface surprises you, when colour does something it hadn’t rehearsed. These are quiet rewards. They don’t always photograph well.

But they do something.

And perhaps that’s the point, or at least a temporary holding place for the point. That in the making of something,something non-useful, non-profitable, non-logical,we assert, gently, that not everything needs a reason to exist. The process itself becomes a gesture of resistance. A way of saying: I am here, and I am paying attention, and that is enough for now.

I recently reread a bit of Agnes Martin, who said: “The value of art is in the observer.” I’d once thought this a lovely abdication of responsibility. Now I see it as generous. She trusted us to finish the work. To meet her halfway. It’s a good faith contract, and these days I find that moving.

Of course, this still doesn’t answer the original question: does art matter?

I remain unsure. But I’m beginning to suspect that it doesn’t have to matter in the loud, sweeping, history-will-remember kind of way. Maybe it just has to matter enough to the person who’s making it,and maybe only on that Tuesday evening when it was created. Maybe it doesn’t change the world, but maybe it makes certain days more bearable. Maybe that’s not everything, but it’s not nothing.

And maybe that’s where I’ll leave it. For now.

Until next month.

, The anonymous artist

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* Read Gibson’s Art of Today for more on this topic.

On the afternoon in June, beneath a sky that could not decide between bright sunshine and light drizzle, a small but determined group of photographers convened outside Maison Bertaux on Greek Street. The meeting had no formal structure, though someone did attempt a roll call and was largely ignored. Thus began the inaugural walk of what we have, somewhat grandly, called the Soho Perambulation Society.

To describe this as a “photo walk” is accurate only in the same way that describing Soho as “just a bit of London” is accurate. The day’s mission was more than documentation; it was observational anthropology with occasional pastries. The agenda: to stroll, to notice, and,where appropriate,to shoot (only with film).

Our route was but loosely mapped. Frith Street to Old Compton, via detours into alleyways best described as formerly licentious, now simply expensive. Each member of the group, armed variously with vintage Leicas, mirrorless Fujis, and at least one phone wrapped in ironic tape, sought their different Sohos.

A brief catalogue of observations and images captured:

• Eleanor M, working in monochrome as always, stood motionless for twenty-five minutes in front of the Coach & Horses pub, waiting for “a man in a hat.” Several eventually arrived, all at once. We await the contact sheet.

• Dr. K. Jenkins, lecturer in photographic semiotics and the only one of us with a rucksack full of actual books, photographed every surveillance camera he saw. “We must observe the observers,” he muttered, before tripping on a delivery cyclist.

• Simon (surname withheld) attempted a series entitled Late Capitalism in Reflections, which involved shooting storefront glass and hoping for some commentary to emerge. Most shots, however, featured only himself.

• Juliette R, who insists on using expired slide film “for the tension,” captured a magnificent frame of a man buying strawberries whilst playing the harmonica – only in Soho. If it comes out it will be the shot of the day.

The group paused for tea at Algerian Coffee Stores, where debate broke out over whether photographing baristas constituted “visual intimacy” or simply “bourgeois stalking.” This was inconclusively resolved.

A detour down Romilly Street yielded rich material: a mouse feasting on a dropped bao bun, a suited man whispering violently into a Bluetooth headset, and the sort of brickwork that belongs in a comedy club.

Scholarly analysis of the event concludes the following:

• Soho remains a space of layered histories, where gentrification, and theatrical ambition coexist in architectural tension.

• Photographing Soho requires patience, quick fingers, and a tolerance for sudden saxophone solos from nearby basements.

• Street photography walks are not so much about photography as they are about permission: to look, to linger, to frame a fleeting arrangement of people and light and shadow and say, this, for one moment, mattered.

The walk concluded, as all great cultural excursions should, with a drink at a pub none of us can now remember the name of. Films were unloaded. Memory cards were nervously reviewed. One member confessed they hadn’t taken a single shot and “just enjoyed looking.” No one judged them, but they were unceremoniously thrown out of the club and told to return their Soho Perambulation Society tote bag.

Soho, as ever, refused to sit still long enough to be captured. But we tried. And for a few hours, we were less ourselves and more like mirrors,half-curious, half-mistaken, occasionally catching the world off guard.

(Next walk: Clerkenwell. Bring an umbrella or a raincoat. The password to join the group will be “Heartily”.)

Let me start with a confession: I have never once asked permission to take a photograph. Not out of malice, nor rebellion but because the second someone agrees to be photographed, they’re no longer the thing I want to see. Consent, in street photography, is an afterthought. The image comes first, moral digestion later.

I go by P. Not because I’m mysterious (though I don’t mind the reputation), but because I once had a name too long to fit on a gallery wall label. Now I just sign with a single initial, which seems to please curators, tax accountants, and the occasional collector who enjoys the idea of buying from someone slightly unknowable.

My latest series, “Oblique Morning / Direct Light”, was shot over two damp weeks in Marseille, where the air smells of broken stone and faint, eternal bread. I walked with a battered Leica M6 and three rolls of Kodak Tri-X. Only three. Scarcity makes you honest. You cannot afford to chase ghosts when you have 108 frames and your back hurts from standing still too long outside an unattended laundrette.

I don’t compose,I hover. I wait. I arrange myself in the periphery of other people’s intentions. The man looking down at his shoe? He thinks he’s checking a lace. In my frame, he’s reconsidering his entire life. That’s the power of a shutter click: it invents gravity where only dust existed.

Someone once called my work “decisively melancholic.” I liked that. Cartier-Bresson had his decisive moment, I have mine,though mine usually occur just after someone’s missed the bus or dropped a sandwich. There’s a quiet epic in every tiny defeat, and I chase them like a priest of futility.

Back in London, I sometimes develop the film myself. There’s a method to it: long evenings with music I don’t like, gloves that never quite fit, and the same cracked Paterson tank I’ve had since art school. The first images surface in the tray like memory fragments. I dry them on a clothesline in the kitchen, next to some rosemary. The smell is confusing.

A few years ago, a collector bought one of my prints,Man With Newspaper, Not Reading It,for what I then considered an indecent amount of money. I spent it all on film, black coffee and an apartment overlooking the Thames. Now, as a represented artist with Pimlico Wilde, I’m told my prices have “stabilised upwards.” Which is to say, they’ve become largely unaffordable. I often meet people who own my work but have never taken a bus. It’s humbling.

Still, my audience has been good to me. They know better than to ask for colour. And they never push me to make work “about joy.” I don’t photograph joy. I photograph the moment just before or just after, when the subject isn’t aware it was joy at all.

I suppose that’s what I’m always looking for: the unseen punctuation in the sentence of a day. A glance that was never meant to be read. A truth not performed but leaked.

And if someone asks what I do, I usually say: I take pictures of people who haven’t decided.

It keeps the conversation short.

, P.

Limited edition prints from “Oblique Morning / Direct Light” available by arrangement.

This review of our latest exhibition by Frances Tood first appeared in the New Welsh Review of Art and is republished here with permission.

Walk into the latest show at Pimlico Wilde East and you are greeted by two sculptures, one that appears to be a collapsed stepladder and another – created from betting slips and share certificates – that might be a critique of late-stage capitalism.

The exhibition brings together eight contemporary artists united by their interest in edges, limits, doors, walls – boundaries and what happens when you gently push past them.

A piece one encounters in Room 1 is Jasper Lute’s Door #5, a doorway made entirely of hand-poured resin and what smells like barbecued marshmallows, freestanding and, crucially, leading nowhere. A small plaque urges viewers to “consider thresholds as social fictions,” which is either very deep or nonsense.

To the left, in a dimly lit alcove, we find the video installation Feedback Loop (I Forgot My Password) by Sonna Sánchez,nineteen minutes of a woman trying to log into an email account while being slowly buried in confetti. “It’s about identity erosion in the digital age,” Sánchez explained in the press preview, though I have to admit I am unsure how.

The exhibition plays with sensory discomfort in ways that are as philosophical as they are irritating. Take the olfactory piece Smell #3: Anticipation, a collaboration between scent artist Wez Zhu and an anonymous perfumer known only as ‘Clifton’. The test tube emits a faint aroma of damp wool with overtones of apricot and orange. When I asked Zhu about the piece, she replied, “Really it is a memory of something that never happened, but probably should have.” I nodded, as though I understood.

In the back room is a piece that has already attracted more than its share of Instagram posts: Duvet of Uncertainty by Sonny Marr. A vast, overstuffed bedding form that droops from the ceiling like a failed attempt at comfort, it invites viewers to crawl beneath and “listen to the sound of 7,000 unread emails being softly deleted.” I did, and found it surprisingly calming.

One cannot overlook the presence of Administrative Vortex, a wall-length oil-painted spreadsheet by civil servant-turned-artist Gill Peale. Columns of imagined bureaucratic tasks are printed on archival paper and connected by twine to a cat wearing a tiny harness. “I wanted to show the entanglement of systems and how they eventually find a way to escape,” Peale said. The cat slept.

The atmosphere at the opening was tense, with attendees murmuring disapprovingly into plastic cups of kombucha. I overheard one man say, “It’s like late Derrida meets Brexit anxiety,” and a woman nearby replied, “Yes, but with more felt.” I couldn’t agree more.

Overall, Thresholds & Other Minor Catastrophes delivers exactly what it promises: art that doesn’t solve your problems but instead rephrases them in ways that feel both beautiful and lightly accusatory. You leave unsure whether you’ve witnessed something profound or a little trite ,but in today’s cultural climate, that may be the point.

4.5 out of 5

Exhibition runs through August 12. Souvenir tote bags are available.

We are pleased to announce that Sir Kelley Sorne is to join Pimlico Wilde. He will have responsibility for our North Pole art gallery, Pimlico Polar, as well as sharing with us his expertise in Inuit collage. He will also be developing his own list of artists, concentrating on Laplandism, the little known movement of artists working in the medium of fish paste, from circa 1876.

We have been referring to Pimlico Polar, our art gallery planned to open at the North Pole later this year as the the world’s first polar gallery.

However we have received a letter informing us that this is not the case. We would like to apologise and acknowledge that a gallery did exist for a few years at the North Pole during the last century.

We print the entire letter below.

To Whom It May Concern at Pimlico Wilde,

I write with what I can only describe as a mixture of polite astonishment and absolute fury upon reading of your recent and widely publicised claim to be “opening the world’s first contemporary art gallery at the North Pole.” While I applaud the ambition, I must,firmly and with considerable historical authority,correct the record.

I, Sir Kelley Sorne, established the Northern Lights Gallery of Modern Forms at precisely 89°59′46″N in the spring of 1934. It was, in every measurable sense, the first gallery at the North Pole. That you have not heard of it speaks more to the art world’s amnesia than to the significance of the enterprise itself.

Allow me to educate.

My gallery was a modest but dignified structure,timber-framed, canvas-roofed, and insulated with whale blubber against the cold nights. It stood alone, glinting nobly amid the snowdrifts, a temple to human expression perched on the roof of the Earth. We exhibited abstraction before abstraction was fashionable, including a magnificent series of ice-etchings by a Latvian mystic named Dobroslav, whose fingers later froze in the act of creating a piece entitled North Pole No. 63.

We showed, too, the early work of Ivor Miskin,once hailed as “the Malevich of the Cold”,including his controversial White Square on White Horizon, which was indistinguishable from the view from the window.

Sales were modest. Our only regular visitor was a Swedish cartographer who bought several linocuts of seals wearing amusing clothes. Financing came from a brief but intense sponsorship by a Norwegian fishpaste consortium, whose board eventually lost interest after one of their directors was mildly insulted by an installation involving dried haddock.

As to why the gallery closed,well, there are only so many months a man can explain to patrons that the gallery is “closed owing to the weather”. In the end, the roof collapsed under the weight of a disgruntled walrus. The final exhibition, Melting Points: Hope and Sadness in Ice, was both poorly attended and, badly water-damaged.

So no, Arctica Contemporary is not the “first.” You are, at best, the second. Possibly third if one counts the brief Inuit collective that exhibited sealskin collages on a drifting ice shelf in 1908, which I do.

I ask only that you adjust your language accordingly. Perhaps “first commercial art gallery at the North Pole founded during a climate crisis by people in designer snowwear.” That would be more accurate.

Yours in cold but resolute truth,

Sir Kelley Sorne, FRSA, OBE, Former Director, The Northern Lights Gallery of Modern Forms

Somewhere off the Norfolk coast, watching the tide, and remembering better days