Cathy's Art Diary

Fun exhibition at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery telling the story of the cities Bangladeshi owned curry houses. The show traced the history of these restaurants from the first restaurant to serve curry in the 1940s, through the first curry house in 1954 to the present day. This showed the social history of a largely unrecorded community. It also looked at the role curry houses came have come to play in British society. There were super copies of menus and restaurant ephemera but most fun were the recreations of place settings though the years and an installation of an almost complete interior from a restaurant in Bristol. There was also a recreation of a kitchen and the staff living quarters. The only thing missing from the show was the smell, oh and maybe a tasting plate! Closed on 14 January 2018  

Fascinating exhibition at Somerset House looking at the effects of the current explosion in data and the effects it is having on society, culture and politics. I will admit I thought this would be quite dry but I’d seen good reviews and was intrigued partly because my work involves data and how you can get different data to work together. The show presented complex ideas in a really imaginative way, for example there was a section on the cloud explaining what it was and pointing out it isn’t as ethereal as it sounds. It showed the data centres involved as postcards of the buildings hanging over a map of the world. I was fascinating by the section that talked about how the internet has given us the tools to record the minutia of our lives which made me realise how much I record online, this blog just being one example! I found myself fighting the urge to look up some of the interesting apps it mentioned as part of the point was that this isn’t necessarily a good thing. ...

Fascinating exhibition at the Foundling Museum about how the Victorian concept of the Fallen Woman was depicted in the art and literature of the time and contrasting that with reality as seen through the museum’s archives. The first section concentrated on images in art while telling the history of the idea. It pointed out that the 1836 Marriage Act had made marriage in registry offices easier so that it was easier to be respectable! It talked about how the growth in urban life made many women more vulnerable. I loved a picture called “Breakfasting Out” by Robert Dowling which showed a shop girl buying a coffee from a stall on her way to work and a gentleman eying her up, as my grandmother would have said! Beware Starbucks girls! In an extra room upstairs they had, of course, borrowed “Found Drowned” by Watts which has to appear in any show on this topic or Victorian morality generally. It was shown by a petition to the hospital from a mother who said that the father o...

Interesting display at Tate Britain of a project by Margaret Harrison, Kay Hunt and Mary Kelly where they studied the lives of women working in a metal box factory in the 1970s. This had a feel of the mass observation and I loved the way the work was presented as an art work such as the sheets describing the timetables of people who worked in the factory which were printed in the same style and hung together. Similarly the pictures of each process with the number of men and women who were employed to do each one also hung together in sequence. The work was done to tackle political and industrial issues from a feminist view point but is now a fascinating insight into people’s lives.

Fabulous exhibition at the National Maritime Museum to mark the Queens Jubilee looking at how royalty have used the river Thames . It looked at how and why palaces were built along the river, how it was used for transport, how it was incorporated into great state occasions as well as private events and how the City of London has supported this. It covered from the Tudor period to the present day and was very sumptuous! I found it magical to see a picture from one of the dinner boxes at Vauxhall Gardens and items from the frost fairs. There was a wonderful changing panorama of maps and views of the river which I found fascinating as I have started to use the river to travel to work. Reviews Telegraph EveningStandard

Small exhibition at the Greenwich Heritage Centre looking at the different people who have settled in Greenwich over the years. This modest exhibition was curated by students from the Greenwich Community College. They had represented each culture by showing their national drink and focusing the few exhibits around it which I thought was an imaginative approach.