Vote for the Ceramics Galleries!!

The new Ceramics Study Galleries which I spent all of last year working on have been longlisted for The Art Fund Prize!! Please vote for us by clicking here - before 5 May!

Finally on the move?

Perhaps it's time to announce that it looks like we're buying a flat. I have been a bit wary of saying anything to anyone, after our unsuccessful attempt to buy a flat in our block last year - but though we haven't exchanged contracts yet (hope to do so this week) it all seems to be going through smoothly this time around. Of course we keep touching wood every time we think or talk about it - actually we should probably be carrying little bits of wood around in our pockets, or like the Log Lady in Twin Peaks, remember her? Funny how we still cling to these superstitions, no matter how secularised we are in the rest of our lives...

Anyway perhaps I will say no more on the subject until it is signed and sealed. But we have decided to prepare ourselves for the putative move by starting to clear out our possessions - of which we have far too many anyway so it is a Good Thing To Do. In the past we used to move every few years, so would have a cathartic clear-out at every move, but we have been where we are now for about 7 and a half years so we have been acquiring without shedding.

Mainly books. We ran out of bookshelf space long ago, and a while back I adopted a one-in-one-out policy. We have now weeded a very large stack of novels and unread non-fiction books and yesterday I spent several hours putting them up for sale on Amazon. (If you're interested, you can view my storefront here). By the time we were leaving to go out for dinner at Abi's, I had sold one!! Very exciting, even if only for the grand sum of £1. Thing is, now I obsessively check my email to see if I have sold any more - none so far...

Today I have gone through my clothes and cupboards and filled three bin liners with stuff for the charity shop and another of rubbish. It's a start - and quite satisfying too.

Next stage is getting rid of the furniture that there just isn't room for in the new place. Anyone for a lectern??


This was an impulse buy from the junk shop on Brixton Hill ... last summer? It looked smaller on the street than it turned out to be once we got it into the flat! I think we thought we might one day live in a huge farmhouse with an enormous kitchen where we could use this for standing cookery books on... Also, even though its tracery is obviously rather damaged, it has a fantastic dedicatory plaque:

which announces that it was 'Presented to the Dulwich Road Wesleyan Mission Hall by the Trustees as a Memorial of the late Miss Craig's interest in and generosity towards the work of the Mission. 1898'. The antiquarians in us got the better of us! Who was this Miss Craig and how did her interest and generosity manifest itself? And how did the lectern come to the sad pass of sitting outside the junk shop on Brixton Hill...? At least we have admired and loved it while it has been with us... But alas, no room for extraneous lecterns in the new flat.

----------------------------------------------------------

This evening we have given ourselves 'repetitive form injury', as K so wittily put it just now, by filling out - in duplicate - visa forms for Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Iran, where we are going in April!! Very exciting - though we have not had much time to think about it. It's an organised tour, so once the visa hassle is out of the way we don't actually have to do anything, except turn up at the airport at the right time - but the forms are a killer, especially since we hardly handwrite anything any more. Next thing to arrange is to be fingerprinted at the Iranian consulate - an arrangement insisted upon by Iran ever since the British government introduced compulsory fingerprinting for any Iranian citizens wishing to enter the UK. Ahhh, so great to live in a liberal democracy...

Joyreading

The cuts imposed by the coalition government have resulted in many local councils planning to cut library resources, and appallingly over 400 local libraries are now threatened with closure. Yesterday was 'Save our Libraries' day with protests and Shhh-ins (!) going on all across the UK. In solidarity we took ourselves off to the British Library, where I felt more than ever what an amazing privilege it is to be able to consult the material there.

This time, I was reading the manuscripts! I called up some of the volumes of the Layard papers - the enormous accumulated correspondence of Sir Austen Henry Layard (1817-94), discoverer of Nineveh and distinguished diplomat in Her Majesty's government. The first letter I looked at was from Henry Cole thanking Layard for the offer to source reproductions of Italian sculpture for the South Kensington Museum; the second was from the Earl of Clarendon offering Layard the position of ambassador to Spain! I think about the third or fourth letter was from Gladstone, another from the designer of the Albert Memorial seeking to ask Layard's opinion - at that time Commissioner of Works - on the monument's orientation! I flicked through these volumes increasingly amazed at the worthies of the Victorian age whose handwriting was passing beneath my gaze... I could have lost myself for hours just dipping in and out of this correspondence which I am sure sheds amazing light on the international political and cultural concerns of the times.

I was looking at these to read the correspondence from Rafael Contreras, the restorer of the Alhambra from 1847 to his death in 1890, which was addressed to Layard between 1870 and 1873 while he was ambassador in Madrid. He was there until 1877 but the letters stop in 1873, I'm not sure why. Though Contreras has been little studied, he has gained the reputation of defacing the monument rather than protecting it, of having an unscientific approach informed by Orientalism. Reading his increasingly plaintive letters, I developed quite a lot of sympathy for him - he was clearly passionate about saving the Alhambra for the nation and about the important discoveries he believed he was making. There aren't many letters and they don't say all that much, but they show the difficulties he was facing in terms of lack of funding for his restorations and the criminal unconcern of the local authorities for the building. It was a difficult time in Spain, with the Carlist insurrections, and he is obviously sorely touched by this - including the imprisonment of some of the Carlistas in the Torre de la Vela. Amazing to see his handwriting and his signature for the first time - which in the earlier letters has a rather pompous flourish, and by the last letters seems rather careworn, spattered with ink splodges.

----------------------------------------------------------

After the library, we went to see The Painter, a new play about Turner by Rebecca Lenkiewicz at the Arcola Theatre. They have just moved to a new location and it's a great warehousey kind of space, and it was a nice production, but alas not a great play. It just couldn't decide what it was about - his art? the origin of his genius? his relationships? his mad mother in the attic? We couldn't help comparing it unfavourably with Red. But Toby Jones as Turner was really good, and we'll go and see other things there as it was nicely done.

Weekend in Scandinavia

Oslo Opera House, built by Norwegian architects Snøhetta in 2008

Last Friday I flew to Oslo for the weekend. The exhibition I have co-curated on Owen Jones and the influence of Islamic design was opening at the Kunstindustrimuseet, and my co-curator Abraham and I had arranged to attend. We both had a really fantastic time. I had never been to Norway before - to Iceland once for a two week Geography field trip while doing my A-levels, and had really loved it, but didn't know much about Oslo and felt rather unprepared. But what a great city! Small - with only 600,000 inhabitants (only 4 million in the whole of Norway - half the population of London!) and you can walk round most of it in a morning, as I did on Saturday. I headed straight down to the harbour to see the magnificent Opera House, the first structure in a regeneration of the whole port as a cultural quarter - they're building whole new buildings to house their museums! - and has been rapidly embraced by Oslo's residents as a city landmark as well as a touchstone for the current heyday of Scandinavian design. It was covered in snow and the day was slightly hazy with a mix of sun and fog giving it the effect of seeming a little unreal, but the great thing is you can walk all over it, and people do - taking their dogs and kids for a walk...! Amazing views from the top as well.

And our Nasjonalmuseet colleagues were very hospitable. On Friday evening, we were invited to a special dinner in the National Gallery, which houses Munch's The Scream, along with past and present directors of other Oslo museums, who were all extremely friendly and down to earth. On Saturday we attended the formal opening in the afternoon, which featured the premiere performance by piano and violin of a piece of music composed in Seville in 1847 by Ole Bull, a famous Norwegian violinist and composer who was said to be so handsome that women fainted when he came into the room! This piece - alas I can't remember the title - was composed for Isabel II of Spain as a gift (of course they were rumoured to be lovers), and was only rediscovered a few years ago in the Spanish royal archives! It was an amazing piece too.

The exhibition looks fantastic - it's the first venue, and as we weren't involved in the installation, it has suddenly jumped from paper sketches to real exhibition hang, though of course the success of the design has much to do with our Norwegian colleagues. It seemed to be really well received, and apparently one lady was so overwhelmed by the positive message of how Islamic ornament was rediscovered in the 19th century and applied in European design that she was seen almost crying on her way to the cloakroom... Abraham and I took ourselves off for a celebratory dinner that night at the wonderful Viennese-style Theatre Cafe, and treated ourselves to reindeer steak - rather nice, a gamey version of a nice beef fillet steak.

On Sunday morning I went to the Viking Ship Museum for a bit of Norwegian cultural history - an old-fashioned but beautiful museum with astonishing exhibits: two complete and one fragmentary 9th-century ships used as burials and loaded with grave goods to see their passengers well on their way to the afterlife... I couldn't believe some of the stuff which has survived intact due to the excellent burial conditions: wooden sleds, even a whole carriage, cooking utensils, food and drink receptacles... but what I was most amazed by were the fragments of Byzantine textiles which had been cut into strips and sewn onto clothing as precious and ostentatious appliqués. Those Vikings really got around!

In the afternoon I went back to the Nasjonalmuseet to give a lecture, which was quite well attended and, I think, well-received. Afterwards our host, the Kunstindustrimuseet's director and chief curator, and his partner, took me on a little excursion up into the mountains to see the terrifyingly steep world-famous ski jump, and also in time to see the sun setting over the fjords... God, it was beautiful!


We had a delicious dinner of smoked lamb and berries at the Frognerseteren Restaurant, watching the sun set over Oslo, while they told me about Norway and I resolved to bring K here as soon as possible. He'd absolutely love it. When they told me about a cruise you can take up the coast on the old Post Office boat, and an 11th-century wooden church on an island in a fjord with views of glaciers behind, I was sold! We're planning to escape London during the Olympics next year so this might just be the perfect solution!

I came home via a couple of days in Copenhagen because I wanted to visit the recently reopened David Collection with its wonderful jewel-like rooms of Islamic art. I found the Danes a little snooty about Oslo which slightly upset me since I had had such a lovely time there - but Copenhagen is also a beautiful city, much much larger in comparison, and my hosts at the museum friendly and welcoming. What a great few days!