Cathy's Art Diary

Strange exhibition at Somerset House looking at how mushrooms have been used to inspire art and what their future is. Yes, you heard it, an exhibition on mushrooms! Evidently fungi have recently been categorised into their own kingdom, closer to animals that plants and they are thought to underpin all life on earth. In art they have been seen as objects of horror and disgust until they were rehabilitated by Alice in Wonderland. There was a lovely selection of drawings of mushrooms by Beatrix Potter and a case of Alice in Wonderland archive material. Contemporary art was represented by the wallpaper pattern by Alix Morrison shown here and a series of prints by Cy Twombly and I loved Amanda Cobbett’s small sculptures of mushrooms made of 3D embroidery. The last room looked at the future of mushrooms including some building blocks partly made from them and a look at their use in medicine.   Closes 26 April 2020

Comprehensive exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery looking at food photography. The show looked at how eating is mundane and carnal but central to ritual, religion and celebration and how photographs about food are rarely about food. It looked at how still life of food, which had always been a popular genre of art, translated into the world of photography. I was most attracted to the early photographs, having recently done a course on the relationship between art and photography, so it was great to see a lovely Roger Fenton of a decanter and fruit from the 1850s as well as Charles Jones’ wonderful picture of lettuces from 1900. The section on sharing food had a fun focus in picnics including a photo of a picnic being held across the Mexican border and a Tony Ray Jones from 1967 of Glyndebourne with evening dressed diners at a picnic table with cows behind. There was a good section on the history of photography for cookery books with a nice array of examples from...

Strange but interesting exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum looking at the role of food in our lives. I liked the way each section looked at how we’d dealt with an issue in the past then invited artists and designers to respond to the theme such as how we farm, trade and dispose of food. I loved a section on how we could reuse food waste from cups and saucers made of coffee grounds, a plastic alternative made from the peeling from a McCann factory and a fabric made from citrus rinds. The picture used here is of mushrooms being grown in the show on hanging bags which included coffee grounds from the café and in turn the mushrooms were to be used in the same café. Another section looked at animals in farming and started with the 19th pictures commissioned by the Board of Agriculture from James Ward to record every type of livestock in the country at the time and to classify them. On display in this area Elaine Tin Nyo looked at the life of a piglet from birth to ...

Nostalgic  small exhibition at the Design Museum to mark 150th anniversary of Sainsbury’s supermarket by looking at the role of their in-house design department in the 1960s and 70s. With the end of rationing in 1954 and the opening of the first self-service store in 1950, packaging took on a more important role as there was more choice and products had to stand out from their competitors. Sainsbury’s therefore saw the need for an in house team to design packaging for their own brand products. They produced hundreds of packages a year and also worked on store guidance and staff publications. I liked a case which took you through the design process for a 1966 cola tin from initial ideas to the finished product. Also a set of photo slides of products on shelves to give ideas of how to make the own brands stand out. It was nostalgic to see some of these packs from my childhood although we didn’t have a Sainsbury’s in my home town until the 1980s. These were exotic desig...

Interesting small exhibition at the British Museum looking at the political and economic importance of food in ancient times and drawing parallels to today. The story was told with just a few objects but it raised ideas I hadn’t thought about before. The division and ownership of land and hierarchical societies only really came about as people shifted from being hunter gatherers to farmers. Also that stable food supply has been at the root of all prosperous societies and the show used the example of Egypt for this and how the pharaoh’s were supported by agricultural production and therefore how it was represented in their burial rituals. Other exhibits looked at the advent of trade in different foods and focused on two bottles from different ages and places which both featured vines as a design. Finally there was a 1950s film about and Englishman who went out to the American mid-West to farm which shows farmers using barbed wire to enclose land which was shown with sculptu...

Poignant exhibition at the Foundling Museum looking at how the institution fed the children in its care. This was a beautifully displayed exhibition and became a history of food in general as well as at the Foundling Hospital. There was good use of art works to illustrate points as well as great archive material. It looked at the social side of food with the idea of what and how the foundling ate emphasising their place in society. There were also interesting displays on feeding infants and the research the hospital did. Originally they had fed babies on bread soaked in milk but they realised there was a high death rate so they switched to using paid wet nurses. I did find it heart-breaking though that a baby would we with a wet nurse until about he age of 3 or 4 by which time the child and nurse must have bonded. How hard it must have been for both of them when the child returned to the hospital and institutional life. I learned some things I’d never thought about, l...

Tasty exhibition at the Pace Gallery at the Royal Academy which looks at how contemporary art responded to the way society represents, consumes and obsesses over food. I liked the series of photographs by Roe Ethridge of almost hyper real Masterchef style food which was so glossy it looked inedible.   Also Elad Lassry’ still life photographs of food. I found Mat Collishaw’s picture of the ingredients for the last meals of prisoners on death row very moving. They were set out like Dutch still lives, photographed again black and given a formal frame.   They were beautiful pictures but you couldn’t forget what they were. And of course who can resist a 10 foot tall fork with a meat ball and spaghetti on it (Oldenburg/van Bruggen) or a bronze kebab machine (Keith Coventry).

Innovative exhibition at Somerset House looking at the elBulli restaurant and the work done there by Ferran Adria. It seemed odd at first to be looking at an exhibition about food particularly when you couldn’t taste or smell it! I must admit I didn’t know much about the experiments in food at elBulli but I did notice that others at the exhibition were there in a sense of awe! There were some very clever ideas such as the screen projection onto a white table cloth taking you through a meal being server and eaten. And who could fail to love the dog made of icing. However by the end I decided it was actually an exhibition about creativity rather than food. The exhibition talked you though the creative processes used in their food workshop and how they developed a “creativity audit” as a standard procedure to assess the degree of excellence of an idea. Reviews Times Independent Evening Standard