Art news

Between Worlds: The Etruscan and Rothko Room at the Slough Museum

by
Between Worlds: The Etruscan and Rothko Room at the Slough Museum

I have stood before Rothkos in many cities,New York, London, Tokyo, Basel. I have wept at the Seagram Murals at Tate, felt the heat of the Chapel in Houston, and endured more than one insufferable dinner party where someone declared Rothko “just wallpaper for rich people.” But I have never, never, seen a Rothko breathe like it does in Slough.

Let me be very clear: the painting Untitled (1954) in the Slough Museum of Contemporary and Non-Contemporary Art is a Rothko. There are those who whisper otherwise, of course,they say the signature looks wrong, or that it’s too pale, too washed. One critic from the Harpenden Standard said it felt “ghost-written.” But having studied Rothko’s pigments and surface-work for over twenty years,including two fellowships and a controversial paper on his early experiments with sulphur compounds,I can tell you: this is not imitation. This is not homage. This is the real thing.

And in the context of the Slough Museum’s most transcendent curatorial gesture to date,a single, dark-hung room where the Rothko shares space with five Etruscan funerary objects,it becomes something even more remarkable. It becomes a conversation across time, across belief systems, across ontology itself.

The room is lit as if by memory. You step in and feel your breath catch. The Rothko hovers at the far wall: a field of somber reds layered over dusky brick, bruised at the edges with a kind of aching silence. It’s one of the “internal fire” canvases,less about colour as spectacle, more about something smouldering inside.

To the right, in low vitrines, are the Etruscan pieces: a bronze mirror, a ceramic kantharos, two votive figures, and a fragmented terracotta death mask. Their patina is real and earned; nothing has been cleaned up for modern comfort. One figurine still bears the faint imprint of a thumb from 600 BCE. You half expect it to exhale.

The genius here,curatorially, conceptually,is in refusing to explain the pairing. There is no wall text. Just a title: “Between Worlds.” And somehow, it is enough.

The dialogue that emerges is not linguistic, but tonal. The Rothko speaks in gradients of longing; the Etruscans reply with the quiet certainty of the dead. His is a lament without words. Theirs is a message etched in ritual. Both dwell in thresholds,of light, of form, of faith. Both ask us to consider what remains when speech fails.

There is a moment, standing there, when you begin to feel the scale of it: the stretch of time between the Etruscan artisan pressing clay around a face, and Rothko brushing red over red in a cold Manhattan studio. And yet,astonishingly,they meet here. They resonate.

It is precisely this kind of curatorial boldness that has made the Slough Museum so unignorable. They do not pander, and they do not explain. They propose. And in this room, they have proposed something profound: that art can function not merely as object or image, but as portal. That across thousands of years, human beings have tried, again and again, to mark the silence. To make death bearable. To touch the ineffable.

I left the room with tears in my throat and iron in my spine. It is that rare thing: a spiritual experience grounded in form, pigment, ash.

Slough, once maligned, now houses a sanctum.

In Response to The Pre-Abstractionist Manifesto

by
In Response to The Pre-Abstractionist Manifesto

by James Calder, Pimlico Wilde

I have read with admiration, and no small amount of sympathy, the Pre-Abstractionist Manifesto. One cannot deny its force, nor its passion. The authors write with the urgency of those who feel their medium has lost its way, and in this, they join a long and noble tradition. Every century, perhaps every decade, art requires its prophets, its reformers, its refusers.

There is truth in what they say. The rupture of abstraction, beginning with Kandinsky, crystallising with Malevich and Mondrian, and later hardening into the orthodoxies of mid-century formalism, was indeed violent. One recalls Hans Hofmann’s remark that “the ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” But what, pray, if one person’s “unnecessary” is another’s beloved? The Pre-Abstractionists are right to remind us that in the name of “purity,” much of life was declared extraneous.

History, too, gives weight to their protest. Consider Delacroix, who wrote that “the first merit of a painting is to be a feast for the eyes.” Representation, at its best, offers precisely that: the feast of recognition, the banquet of form wedded to meaning. In this light, abstraction could appear as a starvation diet, a denial of appetite.

And yet,I cannot follow them to their conclusion. To call abstraction “a mistake” is to erase too much, to reduce a complex inheritance to a single, dismissive stroke. Can we really say that Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow contains less terror or beauty than “a single blade of grass”? Perhaps not terror, perhaps not beauty as they define it,but surely rhythm, structure, balance: qualities that are equally inexhaustible.

Art’s history is not a straight line, but a dialogue, often quarrelsome, between competing visions of truth. The Pre-Abstractionists seek to re-establish the visible world as art’s lodestar. Fair enough. But their rejection of abstraction is too absolute. If Cézanne could see in Mont Sainte-Victoire both a mountain and the architecture of sensation itself, should we not permit both readings to coexist?

I cannot agree that abstraction was a “mistake.” It was a discovery,perhaps a dangerous one, perhaps one that led to excesses, but a discovery nonetheless. It opened a field of possibilities that continues to nourish artists today, just as figurative painting continues to do. To deny either is to impoverish the conversation.

So I salute the fervour of the Pre-Abstractionists. They remind us, as every manifesto ought, that art is not polite, not neutral, but a matter of belief and conviction. Still, as an art dealer, as a custodian of a more catholic taste, I must decline their invitation to renunciation. To borrow from Whitman: abstraction contradicts representation, abstraction contains representation, abstraction is large, it contains multitudes.

James Calder

Pimlico Wilde

Dr. Lucien Varga responds to the Pre-Abstractionist Manifesto

by
Dr. Lucien Varga responds to the Pre-Abstractionist Manifesto

Dr Lucin Varga is spokesman for The Transeuropean Continuum of Pure Form (TCPF), a group of abstract artists who believe in the superiority of abstract art over every other art form. The group was founded in 1932 by Herr Robin Singly in Budapest.

Dear Sirs and Madams,

I write on behalf of The Transeuropean Continuum of Pure Form, a pan-European association of artists, theorists, and institutions committed to the preservation and advancement of abstraction as the only serious visual language remaining to us.

I have read the Pre-Abstractionist Manifesto with a mixture of disbelief and a kind of exhausted sorrow. One expects polemic in art, even denunciation. What I did not expect was such an enthusiastic return to error, dressed up as courage.

Had we still been living in an age of honour, I would by now have sent a second letter: a glove dropped, a time named, pistols or rapiers agreed upon. Sadly, we live in an era of emails, panels, and funding applications. So instead I must content myself with words, though I assure you they are chosen with care and anger.

To call abstraction “a mistake” is not merely wrong; it is catastrophically illiterate. Abstraction was not an escape from the world but its final comprehension. When Kandinsky abandoned the object, he did not abandon meaning, no, he discovered it. When Malevich painted the Black Square, he did not erect a tombstone; he cleared a site. Everything serious that followed had to reckon with that clearing.

Your so-called return to the “real” is not radical. It is reactionary. It is the comfort of recognition masquerading as bravery. The hand, the tree, the face, yes, we know them. Everyone knows them. They are the alphabet of visual culture. To repeat them endlessly is not devotion; it is stagnation.

Let us be frank. All non-abstract art today, no matter how skilful, no matter how anguished its subject, functions as graphic design. Illustration for ideas already formed. Decoration for narratives already written. Abstraction alone confronts the viewer with something irreducible, something that cannot be paraphrased or explained away.

You accuse abstraction of purity. You are correct, for that is its strength. Purity is not poison; it is discipline. It is the refusal to pander, to narrate, to flatter the eye with recognition. Abstract art does not reassure. It demands.

Europe learned this lesson at great cost. We learned it in the rubble of representation, in the failure of images to save us, to warn us, to redeem us. To now propose a wholesale return to figuration as a moral or aesthetic correction is not only naïve, it is dangerous.

You are, of course, entitled to paint as you wish. History will absorb you, as it absorbs all revivals, all corrections, all nostalgias. But do not mistake your protest for inevitability. Abstraction is not a phase to be overcome. It is the condition of serious art after modernity.

With indignation and regret,

Dr. Lucien Varga

Pimlico Wilde Sees Red! Planning The First Art Exhibition on Mars

by
Pimlico Wilde Sees Red! Planning The First Art Exhibition on Mars

In a project that seems to have stepped straight out of science fiction, Pimlico Wilde, the London-based contemporary art dealership, is preparing to stage what will be the first-ever art exhibition on Mars. The venture, announced earlier this year, combines high-concept art with the cutting-edge challenges of interplanetary logistics, a fusion of creativity and technology that raises profound questions about art’s future.

From Studio to Spaceport

The team, composed of curators, engineers, astronauts and artists, has spent the past two years navigating a maze of unprecedented obstacles. Unlike conventional galleries, a Martian exhibition space cannot rely on climate control or even Earth-standard gravity. “We had to rethink every aspect of the show,” says lead curator Helena Doyle. “From how sculptures stand to how paints behave in lower gravity, nothing can be assumed.”

The artwork itself must survive both the launch from Earth and the months-long journey through deep space. Materials that are fragile under Earth conditions can behave unpredictably under cosmic radiation or reduced atmospheric pressure. Even digital art faces challenges: screens and projectors designed for terrestrial voltage and temperature ranges may malfunction on Mars. The team has consulted aerospace engineers, materials scientists, and astronauts to test prototypes under simulated Martian conditions.

Designing a Martian Gallery

Pimlico Wilde has partnered with an interplanetary logistics company to repurpose a habitat module, originally designed for scientific missions at the Pole, into a gallery. The interior will feature modular walls, lighting systems adapted for Martian sunlight, and a floor that compensates for Mars’ lower gravity to prevent accidental tumbling of installations. The artists are experimenting with new mediums: powders, gels, and magnetic levitation sculptures that would be impossible on Earth but stable in Mars’ environment.

Ethics, Sustainability, and Cultural Significance

Beyond the technical hurdles, the team is grappling with ethical and environmental questions. Transporting materials to Mars is energy-intensive, and the exhibition raises questions about humanity’s footprint on another planet. “We’re conscious that our project is more than art,” says Doyle. “It’s a cultural statement about human expansion into space, but it must also respect the fragile Martian environment.”

Art in the Era of Interplanetary Exploration

This venture signals a turning point for both art and space exploration. Historically, artists have pushed boundaries on Earth; now, they are venturing into entirely new worlds. The Pimlico Wilde exhibition will challenge perceptions of scale, permanence, and the relationship between human creativity and extraterrestrial environments.

As launch dates approach, the world watches, not just for an unprecedented art event, but for a glimpse of how culture will evolve beyond our planet. The Red Planet, long a symbol of scientific ambition, may soon become a canvas for human imagination.

Yachtism: The New Wave of Floating Art

by
Yachtism: The New Wave of Floating Art

Is the next great artistic movement being launched not from a gallery in Berlin or a warehouse in Hackney, but from the sundeck of a 60-metre motor yacht? Increasingly, collectors and curators are whispering about “Yachtism” , an emerging tendency among artists who choose to live and work not in garrets, but on luxury yachts, most often moored in the Mediterranean and, for reasons of tax and nostalgia, occasionally in Jersey.

A Movement at Sea

At its heart, Yachtism is less about a unified visual style than a shared context: the artists all create their work on the water, often aboard vessels loaned , or temporarily endowed , by collectors. Their studios are repurposed sky lounges, their canvases stretched across polished teak tables, their inspirations drawn as much from shifting light on the Côte d’Azur as from the ever-present hum of generators below deck.

The results, some argue, are extraordinary.

Artists Afloat

“I paint differently on board,” says Marina Voss, a German conceptual painter currently based on La Sirena, a 45m Feadship anchored in Antibes. “The sea is always moving beneath you. Nothing is stable. That uncertainty enters the work. On land, I made static abstractions. At sea, the brush refuses to settle , it sways.”

Not all agree. London portraitist Doodle Pip, who briefly attempted a residency aboard Golden Osprey in Dartmouth, abandoned the project within days.

“Artists need struggle,” he insists. “The soft hum of an engine room is not struggle. A steward offering you burrata at three in the morning is not struggle. You can’t make raw work when you’re being asked whether you prefer the tender launched at 10 or 11. Plus I get seasick crossing the Thames, so Yachtism is not for me.”

Collectors as Patrons

For collectors, however, Yachtism represents a renaissance of the Renaissance model , patrons providing not only the means but also the stage for creation.

“I don’t see it as indulgence,” says hedge fund manager and collector Clive Mortimer, owner of the 58m Elysium Ho. “I provide artists the freedom to explore ideas without rent or distraction. Besides, a yacht is a floating gallery. Guests step aboard, and the work is there , fresh, salt-sprayed, immediate.”

Mortimer has recently acquired three canvases created on board his yacht, noting, “They smell faintly of diesel and sea air. That’s provenance you can’t fake.”

The Works Themselves

Critics are divided on whether Yachtist works surpass those produced by landlubber predecessors. Some praise their “fluid dynamism” and “maritime palette.” Others dismiss them as “well-funded plein air.”

Yet auction houses report rising interest. A recent Hazelton sale included Wake Study No. 3, painted off Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, which fetched £1,220,000 , triple the artist’s previous land-based record.

An Art Movement or a Passing Tide?

Will Yachtism endure? The history of art is littered with fleeting -isms. Yet its confluence of wealth, patronage and a genuine shift in working environment suggests more than a passing wave.

Whether moored in Port Hercule, drifting off Porto Cervo, or tied up discreetly in Dartmouth’s yacht haven, Yachtism insists on one simple proposition: that art, like its makers, sometimes works best when allowed to drift.

Doodle Pip, Portrait of a Friend II (But which one?!)

by

This latest work by Doodle Pip arrives already trailing a wake of anticipation. In a market and critical climate hungry for the new yet suspicious of sincerity, Pip’s portraits, so resolutely uninterested in resemblance, have become unexpectedly coveted objects. Portrait of a Friend II (But which one?!) continues the artist’s sustained dismantling of verisimilitude, offering not a likeness but a proposition: that portraiture might operate most truthfully when it abandons truth as appearance.

At a glance, the drawing proposes a face, but only just. A continuous, nervously assured line loops and doubles back on itself, sketching a head that seems to flicker between emergence and erasure. Features are present only insofar as they are necessary to be undone: an eye collapses into a slash, the nose becomes an ideogram, the mouth drifts off register. The line never settles; it worries at itself, performing a kind of graphic thinking aloud. What we witness is not depiction but process. Here is drawing as event rather than image.

Art historically, Pip’s work situates itself in a rich counter-tradition to mimetic portraiture. If Renaissance portraiture sought to stabilise identity through physiognomy, and modernism fractured the face to reveal multiple perspectives, Pip goes further still, refusing the premise that the sitter must be recoverable at all. One thinks of Giacometti’s existential attenuations, Cy Twombly’s scribbled semiotics, or the automatic line of Surrealist drawing, but stripped of their respective heroic gravitas. Pip’s line is lighter, quicker, and deliberately unserious, yet the conceptual stakes are no less profound.

Critic and curator Helena Voss describes Pip’s portraits as “acts of productive disrespect.”

“What Doodle Pip disrespects,” Voss notes, “is the idea that a person can be summarised visually. These drawings don’t fail at likeness,they refuse it. And that refusal feels ethical as much as aesthetic.”

Indeed, the artist’s well-documented position that recognisability constitutes failure reorients the viewer’s expectations. In this Portrait of a Friend, friendship is not encoded through familiarity of features but through the freedom to misrepresent. The sitter becomes a pretext rather than a subject, a catalyst for line rather than its destination. This is portraiture emptied of its traditional obligation and refilled with contingency, speed, and doubt.

Another critic, James Leroux, situates Pip’s popularity within a broader cultural fatigue with hyper-definition.

“We live in an era of faces that are endlessly tagged, filtered, and biometricised,” Leroux argues. “Pip’s work is radical because it opts out. These drawings cannot be indexed. They cannot be recognised by a machine, or, crucially, by us. That’s why collectors want them. They’re buying a form of escape.”

That escape is palpable in the drawing’s looseness. The line oscillates between confidence and collapse, suggesting a hand that trusts its instincts while sabotaging its own authority. There is no centre of gravity, no compositional hierarchy; the image refuses to resolve into a stable whole. And yet, paradoxically, it feels complete. The work knows when to stop, not because it has arrived at likeness, but because it has exhausted the need for it.

In this sense, the piece can be read as a quiet manifesto. It asserts that identity is not something to be captured but something to be circled, missed, and abandoned. That a portrait may function not as a mirror but as a trace of time spent looking, of a hand moving, of an artist thinking against tradition.

As Pip’s work continues to be avidly sought after, it is tempting to frame their success as ironic: drawings that look like doodles commanding serious attention. But this misreads the project. These are not casual marks elevated by context; they are rigorously anti-illusory works that understand art history well enough to misbehave within it. In refusing to show us who the sitter is, Doodle Pip shows us something else entirely: the limits of seeing, and the strange freedom that emerges once those limits are embraced.

Do Artists Work Better on Luxury Yachts?

by
Do Artists Work Better on Luxury Yachts?

It is one of the questions currently circulating in the overlapping worlds of art and affluence: does artistic brilliance bloom more brightly when set adrift on the glistening teak decks of a luxury yacht, or does the salt air wash away the necessary grit of struggle?

“Artists Need Struggle” , Doodle Pip, Portraitist

Doodle Pip, a London-based portraitist known for his vigorous brushwork and a refusal to wear shoes, dismissed the entire premise.

“Artists need struggle,” Pip told me, leaning heavily into his pint of warm cider. “Do you think Caravaggio had a foredeck Jacuzzi? Or that Frida Kahlo painted her pain from the aft sunbed of Lady Anastasia? No. You can’t produce anything true with a steward topping up your Champagne. The canvas needs tears, not Tanqueray.”

When asked if he had ever tried painting on a yacht, Pip scoffed.

“I get seasick on the Woolwich Ferry. For me a yacht is a prison with teak flooring.”

“I Certainly Don’t Work Worse” , Hedge Fund

Not everyone agrees. Famous Society Portraitist Hedge Fund, who happened to be on a friend’s Panama-flagged 58m vessel Money Pitt in Monaco’s Port Hercule sees no contradiction in combining artistry with luxury.

“Yacht life is perfect for portraiture. Everyone looks better on a yacht,” Hedge said, swirling a glass of Puligny-Montrachet as deckhands coiled mooring lines behind him, “I certainly don’t work worse on a yacht. Especially moored in Monaco or somewhere else on the Côte d’Azur. When the Mistral blows, I think more clearly. The art world needs more yachts. Every artist worth his salt should have a yacht.”

Hedge Fund maintains that artists should embrace the same environment.

“If you can’t produce a great canvas while anchored off Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, with dolphins on your starboard bow, perhaps you’re not an artist at all. Perhaps you’re just a landlubber with oils.”

The Debate at Sea

Supporters of the “Yacht School” argue that comfort allows the subconscious to roam free, enabling bold creative leaps. Why struggle in a garret when one might paint monumental canvases in the sky lounge of Serenity Ho, cooled by discreet air-conditioning vents hidden behind polished mahogany?

Critics, however, insist that luxury dulls the edge. An unending supply of rosé, they say, makes for more abandoned sketchbooks than masterpieces.

Conclusion

So do artists work better on luxury yachts? The answer, like the sea itself, remains fluid. The question continues to bob between mooring buoys of philosophy and finance, drifting from Cannes Film Festival cocktail parties to late-night studio arguments in Shoreditch basements.

Perhaps the truest answer is found not on deck or ashore, but in the wake of the yacht itself: a shimmering trail of possibilities, quickly vanishing into the horizon. At the very least surely every serious artist should give yacht life a go.

The New Travel Journal of Chester Hubble

by
The New Travel Journal of Chester Hubble

Conceptual Land Artist Chester Hubble writes about his travel experiences away from his highly sought after Walk Pieces. Collectors, worry not, he will return to them in the Spring.

First Trip

I have always distrusted vehicles. They compress the world until it fits a timetable. Walking, by contrast, stretches minutes into material, something you can smear, scrape back, leave to dry. My art practice began as a refusal to arrive too quickly. This journal is a side-effect of that refusal.

My first journey, then, was not ambitious in distance, only in attitude. I went to The Isle of Dogs Foot Tunnel, and decided not to emerge on the other side.

Most people treat the tunnel as a throat: a necessary swallowing between Greenwich and the financial district. I treated it as a room. I entered just after dawn, when the Thames was still deciding what colour to be that day. The spiral stairwell delivered me downward like a screw being gently over-tightened. By the time I reached the tiled corridor, my ears had popped into a more attentive mode.

The tunnel is white, but not one white, more a committee of whites arguing quietly. There is hospital white, nicotine white, the pearly white of glazed tiles that have watched too much water pass above them. I began walking very slowly, slower than politeness allows. This is how I usually start: by irritating the commuters.

My rule for the journey was simple: I would turn back every time I noticed myself thinking of the exit. This meant I spent a long time in the middle, a no-man’s-land where footsteps echo before they belong to anyone. I sketched with my eyes. Cracks became coastlines. Drips were metronomes. A man in a hi-vis jacket passed me three times, each time looking more concerned, as if I were a stain that refused to be cleaned.

Halfway through, I sat down.

This is where the journey became unusual, even by my standards. Sitting transforms infrastructure into architecture. The tunnel widened perceptually. I noticed the curve wasn’t symmetrical; it leaned, like a tired pensioner. I pressed my palm to the tiles and felt the river overhead, not directly, but translated, like Braille for nature.

I ate an apple. The sound of it was obscene in that echo. I kept the core and later used it to mark distances on the floor, sliding it ahead of me and walking to it, again and again. This is an old studio trick of mine: outsourcing intention to an object that doesn’t care.

Time pooled. The tunnel developed moods. Around midday, it became theatrical. Footsteps announced themselves in advance. Voices arrived before bodies. By afternoon, it was domestic, forgiving. Someone had left a single glove on a ledge; I resisted the urge to curate it.

When I finally surfaced, back where I had entered, it felt less like returning and more like being misprinted. The sky seemed provisional. I wrote in my notebook: I did not cross anything today. I stayed with it.

This, I think, is how the journeys will go. Not elsewhere, exactly. Just deeper into places that already think they are finished.

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

by
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.

Arts Around Here Secures New Funding from Dollop Industries

by
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.