Playing at home

I attended what is known as a ‘post-graduate seminar’ on Monday evening. The talk was called Playing at Home: Installations, Gender and Play in Recent British Art and focussed mainly on artworks to do with the home – Rachel Whitread’s Mile End House for instance, Tracey Emin’s tent and Cornelia Parker’s Exploded Matter. It was all very interesting and a lively debate followed on – as did one or two pints of very fairly priced lager in the ULU bar.

Westminster Abbey is one of those familiar, London-landmark type places that I have no memory of ever having set foot inside – although I’m sure I did when I was knee-high to cement-mixer. So I decided to take myself along. It is fascinating inside, completely full of intriguing obese American tourists and Japanese people digging their zoom lenses into the small of your back…at least I think that’s what it was. Once you’ve seen one old queen’s tomb you’ve seen them all – there’s not a lot to differentiate between them. I was particularly struck by some of the funerary monuments though, especially the one pictured which I have since been informed is by the French sculptor Roubilliac who was influenced by Bernini. There’s this wonderfully spooky skeleton hauling itself up from a dark gateway underneath the tomb and attempting to stab the female figure. Great stuff. The wax and wood funeral effigies in the Undercroft Museum were also morbidly fascinating. I was taken with a rather moth-eaten looking exhibit which my scholarly friend has since informed me is the world's oldest stuffed bird: the Duchess of Richmond. Squawk!

Onwards to Mayfair and galleries galore! I took a look in the Albemarle Gallery to see the paintings of people flinging themselves off London bridges by Stuart Luke Gatherer. Downstairs I found some paintings I loved by Tyson Grumm. Google him – he’s great! I also popped in to see Gary Simmons’ House of Pain at Simon Lee, Marc Vaux’s Colour Edge to Edge: Paintings from the mid ‘60s at the Bernard Jacobson Gallery and Euan Uglow at Browse & Darby. I then walked to Covent Garden to the Photographers’ Gallery to see the exhibition Found, Shared which was intriguing, consisting of dozens of unrelated photos which people had physically found lying on the ground or wherever, and sent in to an art magazine. From there I walked to the British Library and then on to City University for an evening class. Beer in the Red Lion led me seamlessly through to a time when the tubes get flaky.