Cathy's Art Diary

Fascinating exhibition at the British Library looking at how maps have been used to hide things, establish power and deceive. The show had a clear narrative and included some amazing maps and objects. Each section was told chronologically but building a theme over time. As ever I was more drawn to the older works but many of the current ones were fascinating too. The show concluded by looking at how maps have been used to marginalise people and had a brilliant video about the people of Kibera in Kenya set about mapping their settlement when it was left off official maps. It then discussed issues of privacy particularly in relation to new technology. Stand out works for me included a map of Portuguese settlements in Asia given to Charles II as part of Catherine of Braganza's dowry   as a sign of the two nations sharing knowledge, a map of Africa commissioned by Mary I for her Husband Philip II of Spain and a quilt made by inmates of Bullingdon Prison showing an aerial view of...

Fantastic exhibition at the British Library telling the story of gardening in England and what it means to us today. As ever at the British Library, the story was told clearly with some stunning exhibits. I love the way their labels set the narrative rather than describing the object in detail. The show was gently themed starting with looking at growing for food, medicine and mental wellbeing, moving on to how gardening can build community, then how garden plants can tell a global story and ending with environmental issues. Each section used books, documents and objects to describe the history but also included videos discussing current practice. Highlights included an Anglo-Saxon herbal, John Evelyn’s sketches of gardening tools, countless beautiful botanical illustrations and the first lawn mower. Closed 10 August 2025

Moving exhibition at the British Library looking at Dunhuang in north east China which was established in 111 BCE as a military outpost and became a vital stop on the Silk Roads. Most of the documents and objects were discovered in the Mogao Library Cave. Discovered in 1900 the cave included tens of thousands of manuscripts, paintings and other objects dating from the 5th to 11th century. The show was arranged by specific, usually named, individuals who represented a type of person or an aspect the culture there such as a trader, a fortune teller and a printer. This brought the often slightly plain looking documents to life. It is a lovely companion show to the Silk Roads at the British Museum which mentions this find. The most moving exhibit is a letter found in a lost mailbag and therefore never sent, written a merchant’s wife to her husband who she had not heard from in the years. Closed 23 February 2025  

Fabulous exhibition at the British Library looking at the lives of Medieval women. I studied Medieval history at university, a long time ago, and how I wished we’d had this exhibition. It was full of wonderful stories and new people to discover. I’ve been twice now and got just as much from it the second time around. I liked the way it was divided into sections on private, public and spiritual lives. The private section looked at domestic life and had a number of displays on women’s health. Spiritual lives included nuns as well as Joan of Arc and her signature had to be one of the highlights of the show. I think my favourite section was the public one which looked at queens and what agency they had focusing on those who became regents and women as patrons of the art. There was also a display on working women such as a notary Juliet Durer from Lubeck and Alice Claver, a silk weaver in London. And my favourite object was Christine de Pisan’s “City of Women” showing women doing b...

Interesting if rather dry exhibition at the British Library looking at the history of Black British music since 1500. The show was packed with information and there were good audio clips but it’s hard to tell a musical story largely with documents and objects like vinyl records. One section did make the best use of the height of the exhibition space that that I’ve seen with tall displays of records in a section on record stores in the late 70s. I was most interested in the early sections which included the note to John Blanke, the black trumpeter at the Tudor court granting him a pay rise and a lovely section on Soho jazz clubs with costumes. I found the later sections less relatable as, I must admit, I don’t listen to a lot of current music but I did notice young people around me were enjoying it.   Closed 26 August 2024  

Interesting  exhibition at the British Library on the children and young persons’ author Malorie Blackman. I must admit I don’t know her work, as I was a bit old to be her target market, but I still found the show fascinating. In telling her story it told the history of writing and publishing by black authors since the 1960s. I liked the section on her motivation and how, as an avid reader as a child, she realised that there were few books in which she saw people like her. It also explained how she went into scriptwriting after a poor adaptation of one of her books. There was another section on her Noughts and Crosses series discussing different editions and the tv adaptation. I was intrigued and it made me want to go back and watch the show. Closed 25 February 2024  

Neat small exhibition at the British Library looking at sea and island pictures by the author Mervyn Peake. The library has been given Peake’s visual archive and this show focused on illustrations of the sea and islands, themes he returned to throughout his career. I must admit I know him more as a writer although I did know he illustrated his novels. There were a couple of individual works as well as three sets for books although one was an early unpublished work he produced with a friend. I loved the fine detail in these pieces which complimented the stories but worked as independent art works as well. Closed 25 February 2024    

Fantastic  exhibition at the British Library looking at the genre of fantasy. I thought I didn’t really do fantasy but went round getting very excited at things that I knew eg the Cotton Beowulf, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a costume from Wicked. Goodness, I have eclectic tastes!      It was themed but by the end it had covered all the bases and you could piece the chronology together. The themes basically covered the archetypal themes from fairies, though quests, via forests to world building. The show used books, manuscripts, games and more to tell the story. I loved the use of playing Steeleye Span’s Thomas the Rhymer next to a 15th century manuscript of the story. I came away with lots of things to look up and ideas of new books to read! Closed 25 February 2024 Reviews Times Telegraph

Interesting small exhibition at the British Library of documents on the history of animals rights from the Enlightenment to today. The first exhibit was a lovely copy of Hogarth’s “The Four Stages of Cruelty” from 1768 which set the scene. This was followed by letters from Richard Martin, an Irish politician and campaigner against animal cruelty who helped found what would later become the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA). Via various 19th century books the show finished with ephemera from 20th campaigns. The website says it closed on 9 July 2023 but I saw it on 30 August.    

Useful lecture at the British Library on Shakespeare’s First Folio to mark the 400th anniversary of its publication. Adrian Edward’s from the library led us through the history of the publication and, in particular, of the library’s five copies. Due to corrections as the work was printed no two copies are the same and he took us through those varieties as well as showing differences due to their use and history. It was very special to then pop to their Treasures gallery to view one of their copies, once owned by Dr Johnson, and with a replacement front page which has been hand drawn as a perfect copy.    

Disappointing exhibition at the British Library on how animals have been documented and researched through art, science and sound. I just say disappointing as the show felt like it was aimed at children and fair enough it is the summer holidays. I’d hoped it would look at the history of how we have recorded animals but instead it looked at the animals themselves via the themes of darkness, water, land and air. The history was hidden in there if you looked but on the surface, it was more about the animals. There were a number of children engaging well with the show via a good activities book. A small criticism is that this encouraged them to use the space where the labels were to lean on and write so they were often hard to read. I must admit I think I would have found it quite a dry show as a child but then I was never really that into animals. There were some amazing books and objects within the show. There was a copy of George Stubbs private publication on the anatomy of the h...

Astonishing exhibition at the British Library of high magnification photographs of insects by photographer Levon Biss. Created through a collaboration between the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and artists each extraordinary image was made up of approximately 8,000 individual photographs of the specimen in up to 30 different sections. Each section was lit in a specific way via a microscope stage. These works were shown in large format and revealed every detail of the insect alongside good descriptions of them. My favourite was the underside of a tortoise beetle whose detail created an almost abstract image. The works were hard to photograph in the show so I’ve used the poster image for the show of a colourful Marion Flightless Moth instead. The library has bought three of these images which are currently in their Animals exhibition along with the specimens they are based on. Closes 27 November 2023  

Intriguing exhibition at the British Library looking at eleven works where writers and artists have engaged with readers using digital technology. I must admit I thought this show might be quite dry but I was fascinated. I think by limiting it to eleven projects you can engage very directly with each one and focus on how it told a story rather than the technology. Some of them had a QR code to access the work if it was free. It would have been interesting to have a bit of information on how you’d access the other pieces. I was lucky the show was very quiet when I went round as there was usually only one example of the work to try out and if it was busier there might have been frustrating queues. It was interesting to watch a child going round with their mother and looking at which of the works kept there attention most. She seemed to particularly like one on the Windrush story which was like a children’s book which you navigated by moving photographs from a suitcase into a frame...

Interesting small exhibition at the British Library of photographs of Chinese people who have forged an identity away from metropolitan life by Jamie Lau. This display compliments the current larger exhibition “Chinese and British”. There were beautiful photographs of people in mean something to them with labels written but the subjects. There were seven works with the photographer’s story being the eighth story. A lovely touch was that a vicar who was featured in a graveyard with a cup of tea had lent family items to the larger show. Closes 7 May 2023    

Fascinating  exhibition at the British Library looking at what it means to be Chinese and British and the history of Chinese people here. It started with the first recorded Chinese person to visit Britain, Shen Fuzong in 1687, who met James II. I was delighted to find he worked with a librarian at the Bodleian Library to catalogue Chinese books. I was also intrigued by Tan-Che-Qua, a sculptor, who appears in a group portrait of Royal Academicians. Most touching was the 20th century section which included lots of items lent by families including this dolls house of a Chinese restaurant and a sailor’s duffle bag. As my family came from Liverpool, I was fascinated to find the Chinese population grew in the Second World War and their businesses thrived despite the Blitz. My parents had never mentioned that.   Closes 23 April 2023  

Fascinating exhibition at the British Library looking at the stories surrounding Alexander the Great and how they developed. The show began by looking at the birth and education of Alexander, both real and mythical, then moved onto his conquests. It then went on to the myths surrounding his further travels and then his death. Being the British Library the show was heavy on books and documents but I would like to have seen more objects both about him and seeing him in his time. As my companion on the day said he’d have preferred a British Museum take on the subject. That said I was interested that’s the stories basically came down to four ‘books’ in different version including Plutarch’s “Life of Alexander” and the “Romance of Alexander”. The show has various versions of these each being used to show a different aspect of the story. They varied in date but my favourites were the illuminated manuscripts. There was lavish use made of texts from the areas Alexander conquered so th...

Fabulous exhibition at the British Library looking at 500 years of news in Britain via news stories. It was arranged under a series of questions eg what makes a good story, can the news be objective and includes some fabulous items such as the earliest surviving piece of printed news in Great Britain, a report of the battle of Flodden 1513! They also had the first newspaper published in England “Corante” which only has continental news due to censorship under James II. It was great to see whole bound newspapers included as you see the context of adverts etc around them. I found yourself drawn to the salacious stories and came out with lots to look up on old murders, political scandals etc. It comes right up to date with Covid reporting and #wagathachristie. There were some great juxtaposition of stories eg Civil War opposite Brexit as each saw opposing sides using a relatively new technology to spread ideas and the Daily Worker and Blackshirt reports of Cable Street Riots. T...

Tiny one cabinet display at the British Library to mark 250 years since the birth of the poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. There were just five items in the display which seemed a shame and only three were by him, a later transcription in his own hand of a childhood poem and   two notebooks. The other two items were copies of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner with illustrations by Willy Pogany and Mervin Peake. Don’t have much knowledge of Coleridge so it would be nice to have had more. Closes 25 September 2022  

Small display at the British Library of newspapers, leaflets and ephemera from the LBGT+ Community in the 1970s and 1980s. As the commentary says it “reflects a time of consciousness raising, identity building and activism”. It is wonderful that this very temporary feeling material has been kept. It not only narrates the history of gay lives and rights in the period but also of how issue related   ideas were spread pre-internet. I liked the humour in it “Bi-Monthly” for the bi-sexual magazine. Every group seemed to have a paper or magazine. It was good to see the infamous “Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin” which partly sparked Clause 28 banning the promotion of homosexuality. Closes 30 October 2022    

Small but sumptuous exhibition at the British Library on the use of gold in books and manuscripts. It covered 17 languages, 20 countries, many religions and the period from 5th century to 1920s. I like that they left the techniques to the end and didn’t let them dominate. There were some fabulous items. I was mainly drawn to Western works as I understand what I’m looking at more. My highlight were a letter to Richard II by Philippe de Meziers including a portrait of him receiving the document, a portrait of Robert of Anjou, King of Naples, and a beautiful Virgin from an Annunciation by Jean Bourdichon for Louis XII. Of the non-Western items I loved a Lives of the Buddha in which he appeared in gold in his different guises so there were gold horses and elephants, treaties embossed on gold from India and some beautiful Qur’ans including one with the earliest known gold-tooled binding. Closes 2 October 2022 Reviews Times Telegraph Evening Standard