Wheel of Fortune (Quarterly Results Pending)- Hedge Fund (2025)

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Not For Sale

In Wheel of Fortune (Quarterly Results Pending) Hedge Fund reduces the luxury automobile to its most hypnotic fragment. The wheel, isolated and enlarged, becomes a circular diagram of velocity, value, and repetition. Rendered in saturated yellows against a field of electric blue and absolute black, the image oscillates between mechanical precision and near-mystical symbolism.

The composition is deceptively simple. Spokes radiate from a central hub like a corporate mandala, suggesting both motion and stasis. The wheel does not turn, yet everything about it implies movement. This tension is crucial. Hedge Fund understands that in contemporary capitalism, circulation matters more than destination. Value accrues not by arrival but by the promise of perpetual rotation.

Colour does the heavy conceptual lifting. The aggressive yellow reads as optimism, hazard, and liquidity all at once, while the surrounding blue evokes institutional calm. The black voids between forms act as pauses, moments of risk, or perhaps the necessary ignorance that allows speculation to proceed at all.

By isolating the wheel from the car, Hedge Fund performs a subtle act of abstraction. Status is no longer attached to speed, comfort, or ownership, but to the component that makes progress possible. The wheel becomes a proxy for the system itself, endlessly spinning, flawlessly engineered, and faintly absurd in its self-importance.

As with much of Hedge Fund’s recent work, irony and reverence are inseparable. The image is both devotional and deadpan. It invites admiration while quietly asking whether this is all there is. In turning the wheel into an icon, Hedge Fund reminds us that modern aspiration is circular by design, and that we are all, willingly or not, along for the ride.

Which Yachts Make the Best Floating Studios?

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Which Yachts Make the Best Floating Studios?

As the movement known as Yachtism gathers momentum, in which artists forsake city studios in favour of life afloat, the question arises: which yachts actually make the best floating ateliers? Not all motor yachts, however resplendent, are equally conducive to oil paint, clay dust or the occasional thrown pot. Below, a selection of notable builders are assessed for their artistic suitability.

Feadship , The Collector’s Classic

The Dutch yard has long been synonymous with understated elegance, but less remarked upon is the extraordinary quality of natural light in their sky lounges. Wide windows and restrained interiors lend themselves to contemplative abstraction. One Berlin-based painter told me the low hum of Feadship’s engineering “functions like a metronome for brushwork.”

Art Studio Suitability: ★★★★☆

Excellent for large canvases, though the pale upholstery is perilous for oil stains.

Benetti , Italian Drama, Italian Light

Benetti yachts, particularly in the 40m+ range, are adored by artists who crave theatricality. Their expansive aft decks provide a perfect setting for large-scale sculpture in progress, though the crew is often less enthusiastic about welding sparks near teak.

Art Studio Suitability: ★★★☆☆

Wonderful light, but too many mirrored surfaces. One video artist reported that his own reflection became the “true protagonist of the work.”

Sunseeker , The Dartmouth Residency Option

Sunseeker’s British builds, often spotted in the West Country, have become the unlikely backbone of the “Dartmouth School” of Yachtism. Practical, slightly compact, and frequently owned by semi-retired surgeons, they offer modest but workable quarters for smaller canvases.

Art Studio Suitability: ★★☆☆☆

Sufficient for watercolours and sketching, less so for monumental triptychs.

Lürssen , Monumental Scale

Germany’s Lürssen builds some of the world’s largest yachts. The sheer scale , one recent delivery measured 136m , allows for entire sculpture studios, printing presses, even a kiln. Yet artists complain of feeling lost in the space. “I walked for twenty minutes looking for my paints,” said one residency participant aboard Rising Sun, “And still hadn’t reached the other end of the boat.”

Art Studio Suitability: ★★★★☆

Ideal for installation art; less inspiring for intimate portraiture.

Sanlorenzo , Minimalist Chic

Favoured by collectors with sharp suits and sharper wine lists, Sanlorenzo’s designs are crisp, white and unapologetically minimal. This makes them ideal blank canvases, though artists report an anxiety about leaving fingerprints.

Art Studio Suitability: ★★★☆☆

Perfect for conceptualists; hazardous for anyone working in charcoal.

Ferretti , Accessible Experimentation

Often derided as the “entry-level yacht,” Ferretti models are nevertheless praised for their compact practicality. Several younger artists have begun their Yachtist careers aboard these Italian cruisers, finding the smaller scale fosters intimacy rather than grandeur.

Art Studio Suitability: ★★★☆☆

Affordable (relatively speaking) and friendly, but, as one artist pointed out from bitter experience, “Not enough deck space for performance art involving livestock.”

Verdict

Feadship remains the painter’s choice: balanced light, sensible interiors, enough prestige to reassure collectors. For the more daring sculptor, a Lürssen offers unparalleled possibilities. But for those merely dabbling in Yachtism, a Sunseeker moored quietly in Dartmouth may be more than enough.

After all, the true measure of a studio, whether in Hackney, Hamburg or Port Hercule, is not its square footage, but whether it persuades an artist to pick up the brush

The Haze of Laughter: Slough Museum Shuts Doors Amid Nitrous Incident

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The Haze of Laughter: Slough Museum Shuts Doors Amid Nitrous Incident

On Monday morning, the Slough Museum of Contemporary and Non-Contemporary Art (SMCNCA) announced it would be closing temporarily, though with an air of indefinite pause, after it was discovered that the main Slough site had become saturated with lingering traces of nitrous oxide, more commonly known as laughing gas. The cause is still under investigation, but early reports suggest that a recent performance by Estonian conceptualist Jaan Karksi, entitled “Breath of the Commons”, may be to blame. The piece, intended as a critique of east European euphoria, involved the controlled release of medical-grade nitrous into the museum’s central rotunda. The control, it seems, was short-lived.

Since then, the museum’s staff have reported light-headedness, disorientation, and in one case, spontaneous giggling during a conservator’s condition report on a 17th-century Dutch still life. The painting in question, a solemn Pieter Claesz vanitas, features a skull, a guttering candle, and a timepiece. It is not meant to be funny.

“We thought it was a reaction to the irony of the museum’s existence,” said Nina Cartwright, founding director, in a statement issued from a temporary office in Reading. “But after several trustees began laughing during a board meeting about budget shortfalls, we realised it was more than postmodern tension.”

The irony, of course, is suffocating. This is a museum that has always trafficked in temporal slippage, pairing medieval devotional objects with contemporary sound art, or displaying a Rothko alongside a misattributed Etruscan bronze. Its very name flirts with paradox: a museum of both the new and the not-new. But laughter, unbidden, chemical, and contaminating, has now become a very literal vapour that suspends meaning, rather than complicates it.

In the words of the late Robert Hughes, “The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.” What, then, to make of a museum overtaken by involuntary joy?

For all its eccentricities, the Slough Museum had begun to matter. In a cultural landscape increasingly dominated by bloated franchises and biennial fatigue, SMCNCA’s Slough outpost remained a strange and sincere curatorial experiment. It was a place where you might turn a corner and find a 1970s land art film projected onto a bin lid, or where a teenage gallery assistant would offer you a cup of builders’ tea and a pamphlet titled “Nonlinear Futures in the Age of the Algorithm.” There was earnestness in the absurdity.

Now, that absurdity has turned gaseous.

One can’t help but recall Marcel Duchamp’s final work, Étant donnés, hidden behind a wooden door for decades, a tableau both revealing and obscure, beautiful and deeply unsettling. That’s what the Slough Museum was becoming: a secret you had to know how to look at. To see its doors sealed now, with hazmat tape fluttering beneath a disused banner reading “The Future Was Then”, feels like a minor tragedy in the art world’s long history of strange closures.

Cartwright remains hopeful. “We’re ventilating. We’re reassessing. We’re laughing less.” She says they’ll reopen once air quality levels are deemed safe and “the works can once again be viewed with the appropriate degree of tragic solemnity.”

Until then, Slough will remain silent, and perhaps all the more poignant for it.

Fruntlar Review Roundup: The Film No One Understands, Literally

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Fruntlar Review Roundup: The Film No One Understands, Literally

Written in his new language Zarvox, Damien Holt’s much-hyped Fruntlar: A Zarvoxian Love Story premiered last night at the Leicester Square Odeon to what could be generously described as “bewildered applause.” Audience members staggered out into the night muttering things that may have been in Zarvox or simply the verbal aftermath of mild concussion.

Below is a collection of early reviews:

The Whitby & Berwick Times , ★☆☆☆☆

“Imagine Casablanca, but every word is replaced with a sound like a broken vacuum cleaner inhaling through a harmonica. The cinematography is beautiful, but I cannot in good conscience recommend a film that made me leave the cinema feeling as though my inner ear had been reprogrammed.”

The Liverpudlian Guardian , ★★☆☆☆

“A bold, uncompromising experiment in language and love. Unfortunately, without subtitles, the viewer must rely on tone, facial expressions and the occasional interpretive eyebrow semaphore. After 127 minutes, I wasn’t quite sure whether someone had just died or just really disliked soup.”

Filmic Magazine , ★★★☆☆

“There is something hypnotic about the guttural crescendos and whistling sibilants of Zarvox, particularly in the rain-soaked spoon-fight scene. However, I could have done without the 14-minute unbroken shot of two characters chanting the word for ‘fish’ until they passed out.”

Rotten Tangerines Audience Comment

“I took my girlfriend to see Fruntlar. As a linguist she loved the film and is now studying Zarvoxian for three hours everyday. She learns in a fully immersive way and will only converse with me in Zarvoxian, so now I have to learn it too. Thanks a lot Damien.

Local Blogger , ★½☆☆☆

“Halfway through, a man behind me shouted, ‘Speak English!’ and a group of Holt’s devoted students responded in unison with a nasal consonant cluster that made him drop his popcorn. It was the most dramatic moment of the night.”

Damien Holt’s Official Response

“Art is about provoking emotion, and if confusion is an emotion, then Fruntlar is already the most successful film in history.”

Award season will soon be with us. It will be interesting to see if Fruntlar wins any prizes.

Aquatheatre: Pimlico Wilde Announces Bold New Aquatic Much Ado About Nothing

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Aquatheatre: Pimlico Wilde Announces Bold New Aquatic Much Ado About Nothing

London’s theatre scene is no stranger to eccentricity, but Pimlico Wilde has raised the bar, or rather, sunk it. Their upcoming production of Much Ado About Nothing will take place entirely underwater, with actors performing in full scuba gear inside the famous Penguin Pool at London Zoo.

Audiences will watch the action from dry land through the curved glass viewing wall, “a natural proscenium arch,” according to the production notes. “We wanted to strip Shakespeare back to its essentials,” explained producer Imogen Firth, “and what could be more essential than buoyancy and a limited oxygen supply?”

The company insists that speaking lines underwater is not an insurmountable problem. “We’ve sourced specialist comms systems,” Firth said. “And in the moments when that fails, bubbles provide a kind of primal poetry.”

Actor Jamie Crisp, who will be playing Benedick, confessed: “I’ve performed in the West End, I’ve performed in pub theatres, but I’ve never performed underwater with penguins swimming past my head. The mask fogging is a challenge. You try doing a witty repartee when you can’t see your scene partner.”

Logistical concerns abound: costumes have been treated with waterproofing resin, swords replaced with foam noodles, and a full team of dive marshals will be on hand to ensure no actor surfaces mid-soliloquy.

When asked whether this is a first, the producer hesitated. “Not quite. We once staged Macbeth inside the Aquarium at Reading Zoo. It worked beautifully until a stingray disrupted the ‘Out, damned spot’ scene. But that’s aquatheatre for you, it’s dangerous, alive, and a little damp.”

The production runs for three weeks.

Folding the Unfoldable: The Furniture Sculptures of Yumi Hasegawa

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Folding the Unfoldable: The Furniture Sculptures of Yumi Hasegawa

At first glance, Yumi Hasegawa’s sculptures look like something out of a dream. Dining chairs curve into arcs as fluid as brushstrokes. Coffee tables fold delicately, their edges crossing like the wings of paper cranes. Stools stretch and twist until they resemble dancers caught mid-turn. It’s only when you approach more closely that you realize: these impossibly light forms are not made of paper, but wood.

Hasegawa, a Japanese sculptor based in Kyoto, has built an international reputation for transforming wooden furniture into what she calls “functional origami.” Using a combination of traditional steam-bending and contemporary woodworking techniques, she reshapes everyday furniture into fluid, folded forms that look too graceful to be real.

“I wanted to teach stiff wood how to move,” Hasegawa says, describing her practice with a gentle laugh. “Furniture has always been seen as fixed, obedient. But I see it as a material waiting to dance.”

From Architecture to Sculpture

Hasegawa trained as an architect before shifting to sculpture. Her early work dealt with modular structures, but she found herself increasingly fascinated by the lines of furniture,particularly chairs. “Architecture is big, monumental. A chair is small, intimate. But both are about holding the body,” she explains. “I realized a chair could tell the same story as a building, only closer to the skin.”

Her breakthrough came in 2015 when she exhibited a piece titled Folded Chair No. 1 at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art. The work looked like an ordinary wooden dining chair until you noticed its backrest: instead of standing upright, it bent forward in a graceful arc, as though bowing. Viewers described it as both humorous and strangely poignant, an object acknowledging the people who would sit upon it.

The Craft of Bending Wood

The process behind Hasegawa’s pieces is laborious. She begins with ordinary furniture,often mass-produced pieces from thrift shops,and then subjects them to a combination of steam, pressure, and cutting. Wooden slats are heated until pliable, then coaxed into unexpected curves. The artist often describes this as a negotiation rather than a command.

“Wood doesn’t like to fold the way paper does,” she says. “Every piece has its own grain, its own stubbornness. I never know exactly where it will give way. I bend a little, wait, bend again. It’s like a conversation.”

The resulting sculptures balance fragility with resilience. Some resemble folded fans, others seem to twist like ribbons. In one striking series, a row of identical chairs has been bent into increasingly exaggerated poses, as if caught in a slow-motion sequence of gymnastics.

Furniture as Performance

Though sculptural, Hasegawa insists her works are still furniture. “I don’t want to strip them of their identity,” she says. “They are chairs and tables, just… transformed.” Many remain technically usable, though often in impractical ways: a folded chair might hold you, but you sit at a precarious tilt; a bent table still supports a teacup, though only at a single corner.

In exhibitions, Hasegawa sometimes invites visitors to sit on her works, turning the gallery into an experimental tea room. The act of sitting becomes performative, a negotiation between comfort and instability. “You become part of the fold,” she explains.

Cultural Roots and Inspirations

Hasegawa’s work draws deeply from Japanese aesthetics. She cites origami as an obvious influence, but also ma,the Japanese concept of negative space and intervals. “When I fold a chair, I am not only shaping wood, I am shaping the empty spaces around it. A fold is both material and air.”

She also acknowledges the influence of traditional crafts such as bamboo weaving, where strength emerges through tension and flexibility. “I want furniture to feel alive in the same way a woven basket does,” she says.

The Reception and Beyond

Collectors and museums have taken keen interest in Hasegawa’s work, and her pieces are now part of design collections in Tokyo, London, and New York. Critics praise her ability to “retrain the eye”,to make us see something as ordinary as a chair with fresh wonder.

Yet Hasegawa herself seems less concerned with fame than with continuing her experiments. She is currently working on a series of folding benches inspired by origami animals, each one suggesting the curve of a crane’s wing or the bend of a koi fish.

“I don’t want to make furniture more beautiful,” she says thoughtfully. “I want to make it more surprising. When you see a chair bow, or a table fold, you realize the world is less fixed than you thought. Even wood can learn to move.”

In Hasegawa’s hands, furniture is no longer heavy, or immobile. It becomes pliant, poetic,caught between utility and impossibility. Her sculptures remind us that the most familiar objects can still astonish, if only we learn to bend our assumptions.

Brewing Art: Five Artists Who Turn Coffee into Creativity

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Brewing Art: Five Artists Who Turn Coffee into Creativity

For some, coffee is more than a morning ritual,it’s a medium and a pigment. These five contemporary artists have embraced coffee in their practice, transforming everyday beans into compelling works of art.

1. Elena Vazquez , Coffee Watercolorist

Mexican artist Elena Vazquez uses brewed coffee as her primary pigment, painting delicate landscapes and portraits in warm sepia tones. The natural staining properties of coffee give her pieces an organic, ephemeral quality: each work subtly changes over time, reflecting the fleeting nature of both art and aroma. Vazquez often titles her paintings after specific coffee blends, linking flavour with visual experience.

2. Marco DiSanto , Espresso Ink Calligrapher

Italian calligrapher Marco DiSanto swaps traditional ink for espresso, creating flowing scripts and typographic designs that smell as much as they spell. DiSanto’s work is particularly known for large-scale installations where entire walls are covered in coffee-calligraphy, transforming gallery spaces into both visual and olfactory experiences. Visitors report the scent as “an unspoken part of the message.”

3. Amina Farouk , Coffee Stain Abstracts

Egyptian artist Amina Farouk embraces the randomness of coffee spills. Using mugs, drips, and puddles, she creates abstract compositions that balance chaos and precision. Farouk views coffee as a metaphor for chance, ritual, and human imperfection. She often layers brewed coffee over gold leaf or textured paper, producing rich, tactile contrasts that draw viewers in for a closer look.

4. Jasper Lin , Sculpting with Coffee Grounds

Singaporean artist Jasper Lin transforms spent coffee grounds into sculptural forms. By mixing them with resin and other binding agents, he creates small, dense sculptures with a unique texture and aroma. Lin’s works range from miniature animal figures to abstract geometric shapes, exploring themes of consumption, waste, and transformation. His studio famously smells “like a 24hr coffee shop at dawn,” adding a sensory layer to the creative process.

5. Sofia Moreno , Coffee Performance Artist

Colombian-born Sofia Moreno stages immersive performances using coffee as her medium. In one notable work, she poured gallons of brewed coffee over a blank canvas in rhythm with live music, letting the liquid pool, stain, and drip in real-time. Audience members sometimes participate, leaving handprints in the coffee. Moreno’s work blurs the line between ritual, social interaction, and art-making, using coffee to engage multiple senses simultaneously.

From painting to calligraphy, sculpture to performance, these five artists prove that coffee is more than a drink,it’s a versatile and evocative artistic medium. Their work invites us to pause, smell, and see, reminding us that creativity, like coffee, is best savored slowly.

Five Artists Who See the World Through a Giraffe Lens

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Five Artists Who See the World Through a Giraffe Lens

Giraffes have long inspired curiosity, awe, and whimsy. Their towering elegance and curious eyes make them a favourite subject for artists seeking to explore nature and identity. Here are five contemporary artists who have made giraffes central to their work.

1. Lila Moreno , Painter

Mexican artist Lila Moreno reimagines the giraffe as a symbol of human resilience. In her large-scale acrylic paintings, she blends giraffe silhouettes with abstracted urban landscapes, stretching their long necks over rooftops, lampposts, and telephone wires. Moreno’s work is celebrated for its dreamlike tension: the giraffes are both out of place and perfectly at home, bridging the natural and constructed worlds.

2. Theo Johnson , The Giraffe Man

Theo Johnson, known in performance circles as “The Giraffe Man,” dons a meticulously crafted giraffe costume for public art interventions. Johnson’s performances range from slow, meandering walks through city streets to choreographed interactions with passersby, encouraging people to reconsider personal space, perspective, and the absurdity of human routines. Johnson likes describing his work as “a way to stretch empathy to new heights,literally.”

3. Keiko Tanaka , Sculptor of Giraffe Shadows

Japanese sculptor Keiko Tanaka works almost exclusively with steel and light. Her giraffe-inspired installations are deceptively minimal: thin steel rods, carefully angled, cast shadows that only reveal the full giraffe form when sunlight hits just right. Tanaka’s pieces are meditative, inviting viewers to notice the fleeting beauty of form, perception, and light.

4. Rashid Al-Salim , Giraffe in Motion Photography

In the deserts of the Middle East, Rashid Al-Salim has captured giraffes in motion in ways that highlight rhythm, pattern, and movement. Using high-speed photography and intentional blurring, he transforms these elegant creatures into surreal streaks of color and pattern across the sandy landscape. His work has been described as “jazzaffe photography,” where the giraffe’s natural grace meets improvisational abstraction.

5. Camille Rousseau , Giraffe-Inspired Fashion

French designer Camille Rousseau has built a couture line around giraffe motifs,not merely prints, but shapes, textures, and proportions. Flowing dresses mimic a giraffe’s neck, oversized collars evoke spots, and elongated silhouettes challenge traditional body proportions. Rousseau’s collections are a playful critique of fashion norms while celebrating the giraffe as an icon of elegance, quirkiness, and individuality.

From painterly abstractions to wearable tributes, these five artists demonstrate that giraffes are more than just zoo animals,they are muses, metaphors, and provocateurs.

Doodle Pip, Portrait of a Friend (Eliza)

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Digital print, 2025

At first encounter, Portrait of a Friend (Eliza) by Doodle Pip presents itself as a deceptively simple gesture: a few looping black lines, a schematic of a head, a suggestion of eyes, nose, and lips. Yet beneath this economy of means lies a practice rooted in deliberate subversion of one of art’s most enduring traditions,the portrait. Where Western portraiture has historically aspired to likeness, to the capturing of physiognomy as a cipher of identity,from Holbein’s clinical exactitude to the photographic verisimilitude of Sargent,Doodle Pip charts a contrary course. Here, recognition is not the prize but the peril. Pip’s portraits succeed precisely at the moment they most thoroughly fail to resemble their sitters.

The work exudes an energy of estrangement. The face, though nominally structured, is never allowed to settle into coherence. Eyebrows hover at inconsistent angles, the nose collapses into a symbol rather than an organ, and the mouth is pulled into an unstable geometry that resists resolution. One might be tempted to read echoes of Matisse’s line drawings, or the calligraphic freedoms of CoBrA and Art Brut, yet Pip’s line lacks the declarative authority of those modernist precedents. Instead, it skitters and hesitates, producing an anti-formal elegance that seems always on the verge of dissolving back into doodle.

The title, Portrait of a Friend (Eliza), is equally destabilising. Friendship conventionally presupposes recognition, intimacy, shared experience. Yet Pip renders the “friend” utterly unknowable, untraceable, anonymous. In this, the work recalls Derrida’s writings on hospitality,the paradox of welcoming the Other who must remain Other in order to truly be encountered. Pip’s practice stages this paradox in visual form: the sitter is welcomed into the space of representation only by being denied true recognisability.

What emerges is a portraiture of negation, one that insists that presence need not depend on resemblance. Pip seems to ask: what is it we actually see in others? Is it their features, or the untranslatable surplus of being that exceeds depiction? By refusing likeness, Pip paradoxically gestures toward something more authentic, a presence that resists capture.

Thus, this work belongs to a lineage not of portraiture as mimesis, but as critique,an heir to the grotesque caricatures of Daumier, the disassembled visages of Picasso, and the blind contour drawings of contemporary experimental practices. Yet Pip’s unique contribution lies in their playful insistence that a portrait should fail in order to succeed. The failure here is not lack, but a rigorous methodology: to make a face less like itself is, in Pip’s aesthetic logic, to bring it closer to art.

Arts Around Here Secures New Funding from Dollop Industries

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Arts Around Here Secures New Funding from Dollop Industries

Arts Around Here, the organisation dedicated to bringing art out of the gallery and into the everyday lives of people across towns and cities, has received a major boost thanks to new funding from Dollop Industries.

The partnership promises to help expand the organisation’s mission of making creativity accessible, unexpected, and part of daily community life. Known for its pop-up performances, large-scale public artworks, and community-led projects, Arts Around Here has built a reputation for transforming ordinary spaces into places of connection and imagination.

A spokesperson for Arts Around Here said:

“This funding means so much,not just for us, but for the communities we serve. We’ve always believed art should be something you stumble across in your local high street, your park, or even your bus stop. With Dollop Industries’ support, we can bring even more of those joyful, surprising moments to life.”

Dollop Industries, a long-standing supporter of cultural and community initiatives, emphasised the importance of investing in creativity at street level.

“We are delighted to partner with Arts Around Here,” said a company representative. “Art belongs everywhere people live, work, and gather,not just in galleries. This collaboration allows us to help make that vision a reality.”

The new funding will support upcoming projects, including more opportunities for local artists, larger-scale installations in public spaces, and workshops designed to bring communities together.

Reaction to the announcement has been overwhelmingly positive, with local residents and artists alike welcoming the news. With fresh backing and a shared vision, Arts Around Here and Dollop Industries are set to bring colour, imagination, and inspiration into everyday places across the region.