Cathy's Art Diary

Informative exhibition at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry looking at the city in the First World War. There was the usual selection of objects and tracing of details of the men who had served. There was a lovely water colour of a billet by Kenneth Wotten. I liked the information boards particularly the one with the best and easies to follow time line of the battles I’d seen. Most interesting however was the section on the role of industry in the war including a piece on the men of the Coventry Fortress Company who all signed up as part of the Machine Gun Corps and become some of the first tank crews. I also got a sense of a militant city. In late 1917 there had been a strike in the Coventry factories doing war work and leaflets were dropped on the city to urge people back to work. Also at there was rioting at the main commemoration service as former soldiers and factory workers were not included in the parade. Two incidents I had not heard of a gave a d...

Interesting exhibition at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry of photographs by Jason Scott Tilley. The show looked at three groups of photographs Tilley made over a ten year period travelling around India taking portraits of the people he met. He was inspired to do this by the work of his grandfather Bert Scott, who had been a press photographer in India before partition. The pictures were very tender and showed an involvement with his subjects. There were a set of various beggars who he got to know over a period of time and a number where people came up and asking him to include them. I liked the fact they were show with an album of his train tickets. These pictures were twinned with a selection of work from a Victorian publication “The people of India” which attempted to get a better understanding of the people in that part of the British Empire. The text with the pictures showed the assumptions and attitudes of the time. Finally there was also work...