Cathy's Art Diary

Classy exhibition at Somerset House marking the 20 th anniversary of the Paris fashion house Maison Martin Margiela. I must admit I couldn’t visualise myself in the clothes but I felt they were clothes as art. I loved the trompe l’oeil works especially the boots which looks like sandals with legs! More importantly it was a wonderful laid out exhibition which was also an art work in itself. I liked the display of the shoulders of jackets to show tailoring techniques and the room upstairs with easy chairs from which to watch videos of fashion shows.

An exhibition at Somerset House of work by 100 young people aged 14-16 attending Saturday morning art and design classes at Cleveland College of Art and Design, Hereford College of Art, Leeds College of Art and Plymouth College of art. It was just a small exhibition but I felt a buzz for the children that they had a show at a prestigious venue. In particular I liked the groups which had made plaster casts of their torsos and decorated them.

Exhibition to show the six shortlisted finalists for the next competition to find an art work for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square held at St Martin in the Fields . I love the idea of using this Plinth for modern public works of art so rushed to the exhibition on its first weekend. It was a small exhibition in a nice space and it was great to hear people talking about the works and enthusiastically voting. I’d seen press coverage of the finalists the day before and made my mind up which one I liked best. But on the day I changed my mind and voted for “It’s never too late and you can’t go back” by Mariele Neudecker . This was a mountainscape on stilts. From the press coverage I had though it would look dull from below as all you would see would be the bottom however I’d not appreciated that the plate of the bottom was a map of Great Britain . As one of the two winners will be in the Square during the Olympics I felt this was appropriate. Reviews Times Guardian Daily Tel

Nice exhibition at the British Library looking at the history of maps concentrating on how they were used and displayed. I liked that fact they were displayed as they would have been categorizing the display areas as the rooms in which they would have been shown and that it looked at them as objects rather than concentrating on how they had been made. It was also good to see the old and new mixed and I spent ages looking and laughing with the Grayson Perry Mappa Mundi. My favorite piece was a tapestry from the 17th century which was one of a series made for a landowner. I was intrigued to find that the tapestry on show was of Oxfordshire, where I was born and brought up. I loved the small depictions of the local towns and villages. Reviews Times Daily Telegraph