This week I promised an Ana Mendieta shout-out, and with Yayoi Kusama’s passing still sitting with me, AND the will-i-am interview with Bloomberg, I’ve been thinking more broadly about artists who were ahead of their time.

Chances are you’ve heard the name Ana Mendieta, but perhaps not for the reasons she deserved. Her shocking performances and stunning images made her the talk of the art world in the 1970s and 80s, yet she would become most famous not for her art, but for her death. In 1985, aged 36, Mendieta fell from the 34th-floor window of the New York apartment she shared with her husband, the minimalist sculptor Carl Andre. He was tried for her murder and acquitted. Ever since, “Where is Ana Mendieta?” has been chanted and stencilled outside museums whenever Andre’s work goes on show, forcing the art world to say her name alongside his. It’s one of the ugliest footnotes in twentieth-century art history, and, I think, part of why Mendieta’s practice has so often been flattened into tragedy rather than applauded for what she was trying to do with art and education.

Ana Mendieta was a Cuban-born artist who knew displacement firsthand. Sent to the United States at twelve through Operation Pedro Pan, she spent years moving between foster homes and orphanages in Iowa, separated from her family. That experience of exile would become central to her work. Less often mentioned is that, while developing that practice, Mendieta also spent two years teaching art to elementary-school children, which is how I found her work.

Over the last year I’ve found myself interrogating AI, social media, museums, education, and what it actually means to live an artistic life. At first those subjects felt unrelated, until I realised they might all be asking the same question: what can artists bring to this day and age that makes them invaluable? Cue Ana.

Throughout the 1970s and early 80s, Mendieta worked across performance, sculpture, photography, film and the landscape, often making things designed to disappear. She carved silhouettes into the earth, traced her body in flowers and shaped figures from mud, sand and fire. Many of the photographs we know today aren’t the works themselves, but evidence that they once existed.

You see, we tend to tell the history of modern art as a history of new styles. Cubism replaced Impressionism, Minimalism reacted against Abstract Expressionism, Conceptual art questioned the object. But underneath those movements runs another history: artists redefining what art is for!?! Is it to produce beautiful objects? Represent the world? Preserve memory? Challenge power? Or something more elusive than any of that?

What fascinates me is that Mendieta wasn’t interested in making permanent objects to be admired, she wanted experiences with emotional weight. She once said the turning point in her practice came when she realised her paintings were “not real enough” for what she wanted to communicate, she wanted her images to carry “power” and “magic.” So instead of producing images that represented experience, she started creating experiences that were only later documented, through photography and film. Her body became a tool and the earth she used was more of a collaborator than a material.

I suspect that’s also why her practice feels so important in 2026. We’re living through a moment in which images have never been easier to make, and yet we seem to crave presence more than ever.

I pay for concerts, travel to cities for exhibitions and, even when I can stream something online, still want to be in the room. We don’t only want the art anymore; we want the energy that made it. Mendieta understood this decades ago: sometimes the most important part of an artwork isn’t the object left behind, but the act of making it.

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From The Factory >

Inventory. A final sketch from my time at the Montresso* Foundation in Morocco, mapping the works I made and left behind in the studio.

Prompts >

JOURNAL:
If your work didn’t result in an object, what would you still want someone to experience?

ASK SOMEONE:
What has taught you more than school ever did?

CREATIVE ACT:
Make something that disappears within twenty-four hours.

Leave a comment

Musings >

“I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (nature). My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe.”
- Ana Mendieta

“The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.”
- Robert Henri

“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.”
- Plutarch

“The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is, it’s to imagine what is possible.”
- Bell hooks

To the curious

With love

Karimah

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Henry Moore and more

5 June 2026 to 23 May 2027

The gist: four Henry Moores, five hundred acres of wild Sussex garden, and a birthday visit. This week's less about an exhibition and more about why sculpture might just belong outside.

Hey museum rats, I’ve got my Instagram algorithm working really nicely for me. Between artist residency call-outs and archival fashion imagery, little art destinations make their way through. I’ve currently got a slurry of places in the South of France saved because I love Matisse, Picasso and Chagall, but recently one appeared that I’d never heard of: Wakehurst.

Wakehurst is Kew’s wild botanic garden in Sussex. I know, yawn, but I happened to be nearby for my birthday, so off I went, with absolutely no idea that four Henry Moore sculptures had been placed across the landscape.

Turns out I’d accidentally walked into the smaller half of a pretty major Henry Moore moment.

“A large piece of stone or wood placed almost anywhere at random in a field, orchard, or garden, immediately looks right.”
- Henry Moore

Almost twenty years after Kew’s last major Moore exhibition, the Royal Botanic Gardens and Henry Moore Foundation have reunited for a two-site presentation of his work. At Kew Gardens in London, Henry Moore: Monumental Nature is the largest outdoor presentation of Moore ever staged, with 30 sculptures across its 320 acres, alongside more than 90 bronzes, carvings, drawings and prints indoors. Down at Wakehurst, Henry Moore and more takes a quieter approach: four Moore sculptures dispersed through the landscape alongside contemporary work by Rana Begum, Rafael Pérez Evans and Paloma Varga Weisz. The Wakehurst exhibition was developed with the Henry Moore Foundation and curated in partnership with the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds.

The choice of setting is apt. Wakehurst sells itself as lab (rather than a stuffy traditional park) home to woodland and Seed Banks, so it’s more of a generous experimental experience as far as English parks go. And for Henry More, nature was fundamental to his practice.

Hence brining Moore sculpture out from the museum where we usually encounter them into the park feels like experiencing Henry Moores work as he would have wanted us to.

I first learnt about Moore in GCSE art (Grade 10 for the internationals) and remember loving the uncanny mix of reality and dream in his bronze figures. They’re bodies, but also rocks, caves, bones and hills: surreal and timeless. Born in Yorkshire in 1898, Moore became one of the defining British sculptors of the twentieth century, from the European avant-garde of the 1930s to his post-war bronzes. Throughout it all, Moore studied natural forms and returned obsessively to the reclining figure, often blurring the line between body and landscape.

Which is why Wakehurst makes so much sense. What I love about Moore is how the work changes as you walk around it. From one angle it’s a body looking graceful and from another the emotion looks aggressive; a hole frames a tree, a shoulder becomes a hill. You get several sculptures in one, almost like walking around a Cubist painting. And gardens let you experience sculpture differently: without a prescribed viewpoint, you get to engage with the work more like a sculptor would when carving the block - getting 360 degrees of play.

I always imagine the spirit of the artist being slightly happier about this arrangement too. Think Calder, Rodin, Niki de Saint Phalle - all artists who have incredible sculpture gardens. There’s something much more alive about walking, cycling or running past sculpture than standing obediently in front of it in a museum.

Museum Rat’s verdict? I wouldn’t drive three hours solely for these four Moores unless you’re a superfan.

Instead, find your nearest sculpture park, take someone, get lost, and see what the work does once the museum disappears. And if nobody's looking, maybe touch a sculpture or two ;)

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Planning Your Visit

• Website

• Address: Kew Wakehurst, Selsfield Rd, Haywards Heath RH17 6TN, U.K

• Opening hours:

  Mon - Sun : 10AM - 6PM

• Admission: £16

If you like this, you'll like.

Vigeland Park in Oslo, an entire public park given over to one sculptor. Or the Hakone Open-Air Museum in Japan, one of the biggest Moore collections outside Britain, scattered across a mountain instead of a Sussex valley.

Read next. If you like this check out the Le Jardin Secret piece I wrote > More every week at thegremlins.substack.com.

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What’s the role of art in an age of AI?

It’s a question I get asked surprisingly often. Usually it arrives disguised as something practical. “Are you worried AI will replace artists?” or “Do you think there’ll still be jobs?” I almost always find myself smiling before I answer.

“No,” I reply.

It’s not that I underestimate what artificial intelligence is capable of. Quite the opposite. I think AI will change almost every creative industry with astonishing speed and entire professions will be forced to redefine themselves. Yet I don’t believe that means the role of the artist disappears, just that it becomes harder won.

The question assumes that art is primarily about producing objects. If that’s true, then perhaps there is something to fear. If art is simply the manufacturing of images, then machines will become extraordinarily good at it. But I don’t think that’s ever been the deepest purpose of art.

To me, the role of art has never been to decorate walls. It’s to transform the person making it and, if they are fortunate, the person encountering it. Art is something we live before it becomes something we look at.

So yes, AI makes it easier to produce images, but that isn’t the same thing as becoming an artist.

Perhaps that’s why I rarely worry; because I’ve tasted the medicine that comes through the alchemy of turning life into expression.

The people most anxious about AI often imagine art as something that lives out of reach behind glass in museums, with prices even farther out of reach. And I’ve always gotten angry when art gets idolised. Because who gets to benefit in that hierarchy? Whenever there’s a gatekeeper between you and divinity (art, beauty, God) it’s wise to be skeptical.

I’ve always been more interested in what happens when art escapes those rooms. What happens when a conversation becomes art? When walking, noticing, painting, reading or listening become artistic acts? If art is available to everyone, then our museums, libraries and even our ordinary days become places where creativity is practised rather than merely observed.

I say “can” deliberately, because living artistically isn’t always comfortable.

To genuinely make art requires attention, and attention has a habit of revealing things we’d often rather avoid. Old grief, fear, shame and longing rarely disappear because we ignore them. The creative process asks us not to suppress the crunchy bits but to work with them. We don’t transform our lives by pretending everything is fine, we transform them by making something from what we find.

That’s one reason I think AI changes less than people imagine.

Artificial intelligence can generate an image in seconds. It cannot spend twenty years becoming the person capable of making that image. It cannot experience exile, heartbreak, obsession or wonder. It cannot accumulate memory, notice the smell of rain on concrete, or the strange feeling of returning somewhere after a decade away. Those things remain stubbornly human.

Because of that, I suspect AI won’t destroy authenticity but it will increase our appetite for it.

These days, we’ve become so used to out sourcing thinking that somebody who can do basic mental maths or remembers a little about a lot seems impressive. I wonder whether something similar will happen with art. As generated images become commonplace, the experience of witnessing someone dedicate years to learning an instrument, carving wood, throwing clay or painting by hand may become even more valuable precisely because it wasn’t the quickest route.

Perhaps the artwork itself will become only part of what we value, and and the process that shaped it may become MORE significant than the finished object. Yes, provenance has always mattered in art. In the future, perhaps process becomes provenance.

Curiously, an artist reached this conclusion long before artificial intelligence existed.

In 1972, Ana Mendieta abandoned painting because, as she later explained, it was no longer “real enough” for what she wanted to express. She was searching for “magic” and her work shifted away from producing objects towards teaching students and working with the landscape. To Ana, the artwork was the lived experience itself.

Next week, I’ll write more on that. I have a feeling Ana Mendieta understood something about the future of art that the rest of us are only just beginning to recognise.

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From The Factory >

The Road to Marrakech
211 cm x 140 cm
Acrylic and natural pigment on canvas

Prompts >

JOURNAL:
What part of your life could no machine ever experience for you?

ASK SOMEONE:
What do you think creativity is for?

CREATIVE ACT:
Create something that only you could make because only you have lived your life.

Leave a comment

Musings >

“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”
- Alan Turing

“The scientist discovers that which exists. The artist creates that which never was.”
- Karl Lagerfeld

“The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.”
- Richard Hamming

“I love you more than my own skin.”
- Frida Kahlo

To the real ones. With love.

Karimah

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Frida: The Making of an Icon | Tate Modern

Until 03 Jan 2027 . £25

The gist: Tate’s huge Frida Kahlo exhibition is less a retrospective of her paintings and more an investigation into how the Mexican artist became one of the most recognisable women in the world. In other words, how did Frida become ‘Frida’?

Frida: The Making of an Icon is Tate Modern’s big summer blockbuster, and blockbuster really is the word: more than 41,000 tickets were sold before it even opened, a Tate record. But this isn’t a traditional retrospective. Rather than simply gathering Frida Kahlo’s paintings, the exhibition asks how a Mexican painter born in 1907 became one of the most recognisable women of the twentieth century. Paintings sit alongside photographs, personal objects, work by Diego Rivera and generations of artists influenced by her. We meet Frida the painter, wife, communist, disabled woman, lover, feminist symbol and, eventually, commodity.

“I love you more than my own skin.”
- Frida Kahlo

Of all the things I’ve taken from Frida, though, her iconography isn’t necessarily one of them. It’s her letters, her resilience, her instinct for colour and, maybe most of all, her ability to love hard. Her relationship with Diego Rivera alone contained marriage, divorce, remarriage and affairs on both sides, yet love remained one of the great currents running through her life and work. Then there was her body: after a bus accident at eighteen left her severely injured, periods of immobility and pain followed her for the rest of her life. Like a true artist with their back against the wall, Frida Kahlo turned all of this (love, betrayal, nature, hospitals, desire) into art. There is something about the way Frida rooted femininity in strength without losing vulnerability that I’ve always found incredibly moving.

And this is where I struggled with the Tate. I understand what the exhibition is doing. The transformation of a person into an icon is fascinating, especially when Frida’s face now exists almost independently of her paintings. But somewhere inside this enormous exhibition about Frida, I started to miss Frida herself. The further I travelled through the show, towards influence, identity and eventually merchandise, the more I wanted to move in the opposite direction: away from the icon and back towards the woman. I wanted more love, more heartbreak, more truth about the illness. Ultimately more sisterhood and more of the strange interior life that produced the paintings in the first place. We already understand that artists become brands and images become commodities. I’m not sure we need reminding of that as urgently as we need reminding of what it takes to remain soft in a difficult world.

Maybe that’s unfashionably romantic, but I think we need more of the romantic right now. Frida could be romantic without being naive, wounded without becoming weak. She declared love without making herself smaller for having done so. No exhibition can contain an entire person, but the best retrospectives have made me leave feeling temporarily closer to an artist, as though I’ve borrowed their eyes for an afternoon. Here, I left knowing more about the construction of Frida Kahlo, but somehow feeling less close to her. And I couldn’t shake one question: why, as a woman who loves deeply, did I not leave a Frida Kahlo exhibition feeling more loving, more courageous in that love, and somehow more myself?

Museum Rat’s verdict? Go expecting more than a Frida retrospective: paintings, photography, ephemera, cultural history and the many artists and movements that turned Frida Kahlo into Frida. It’s smart, ambitious and absolutely worth seeing, I just wanted more soul.

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Planning Your Visit

• Website

• Address: Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG

• Opening hours:
  Sun - Thurs: 10AM - 6PM

  Fri - Sat: 10AM - 9PM

• Admission: General entry is free, temporary exhibitions are ticketed

Similar Places

If you want to get closer to the woman behind the icon, go to Casa Azul in Mexico City, Frida Kahlo’s lifelong home and now the Museo Frida Kahlo.

For remote viewing look back at the V&A’s 2018 exhibition, Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up which is built around her clothes and possessions discovered at Casa Azul.

Maybe the best companion to this Tate show isn’t another museum at all: read Frida’s letters. This is what put me on to Frida Kahlo as the lover, friend, artist and woman I know.

Read next. If you like this check out the Giacometti piece I wrote > Museum Rat #09. More every week at thegremlins.substack.com.

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The Art of Care

My deepest dream is that hospitals will be the museums of the future.

Not because medicine has failed, but because our understanding of healing has expanded beyond treating illness alone. We will come to recognise that recovery is biological, emotional, cultural and deeply human, and that paintings, music, architecture and beauty are not luxuries added after healing has begun but part of the environment in which healing becomes possible.

Science may not yet support this idea in its entirety, but something in me has always known it to be true. And it’s the North Star I move towards.

After all, what is colour if not light travelling at different wavelengths? What is sound if not vibration moving through air? We already use X-rays, lasers, ultraviolet light and ultrasound to diagnose and treat the body because we understand that invisible frequencies can alter our physical state. Perhaps one day our understanding of care will become broad enough to ask a different question: if certain frequencies can heal the body, might beauty also shape the conditions in which healing takes place?

Long before humans built telescopes powerful enough to study distant galaxies or microscopes capable of revealing the hidden machinery inside a cell, we were asking a far older question: what makes a life worth living? Although civilisations arrived at different myths, philosophies and religions, they returned, time and again, to remarkably similar answers.

The ancient Egyptians believed the heart was the true measure of a person. After death, it was said to be weighed against the feather of Ma’at, the principle of truth, harmony and balance. A heart made heavy by greed or cruelty could not continue its journey, while a lighter heart belonged to someone who had lived with care.

Centuries later, Aristotle reached a similar conclusion through philosophy rather than mythology. He argued that a good life was not built from extraordinary moments but from ordinary actions repeated over time. Character, he believed, was cultivated like a garden. We become what we repeatedly practise, which meant that care was not simply an emotion but a way of living.

During the Islamic Golden Age, scholars, physicians and philosophers expanded this understanding still further. The Arabic word ri’ayah speaks not only of caring but of stewardship: tending faithfully to what has been entrusted to you. To heal the sick, preserve knowledge, study the stars or cultivate wisdom was understood as participating in the flourishing of the world itself.

What I find amazing is that modern science seems to be rediscovering many of these ancient intuitions, only now through the language of neuroscience, psychology and biology rather than myth and philosophy. Neuroscience tells us that attention reshapes the brain through neuroplasticity. Psychology shows that repeated actions become habits, while biology reminds us that cooperation has always been as essential to survival as competition. Although each discipline approaches the question differently, they all point towards the same idea: what we repeatedly give our attention to changes who we become.

Why, my lovely humbly Gremlin am I telling you this?

Because when we begin to organise our lives around care, our relationship with the world changes alongside it. Our perspective widens, creativity returns and our relationships deepen, allowing possibilities that once felt beyond our reach to gradually come into view.

Care, then, is perhaps more than kindness. It is a way of directing attention towards what allows both ourselves and others to flourish.

The Egyptians, the Greeks, Islamic scholars all spoke of stewardship. Different cultures, separated by thousands of years, have arrived at strikingly similar conclusions: the person we become is shaped less by a single life-changing decision than by the countless moments in which we choose where to place our attention, our energy and our love.

Which brings me back to my dream.

Perhaps one day walking into a hospital will feel less like entering an institution and more like stepping into a Rothko room or sitting beneath a live jazz performance. Not because art replaces medicine, but because it stands scientifically next to it. Reminding us that healing has always been more than repairing tissue. It’s also about restoring hope, imagination and meaning, and creating the conditions in which a person can begin to feel whole again.

Perhaps that has been the science of care all along.

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From The Factory >

Watch

Prompts >

JOURNAL:
Which environments make me feel most alive and healthy?

ASK SOMEONE:
When have you felt most deeply cared for, and what made that experience unforgettable?

CREATIVE ACT:
Visit a gallery, museum or beautiful public space. Pay attention to how your body, thoughts and emotions change while you are there.

Leave a comment

Musings >

“The effect in sickness of beautiful objects, of variety of objects, and especially of brilliancy of colour… are actual means of recovery.”
- Florence Nightingale

“Understanding of disease cannot be separated from the understanding of the person. They are interwoven.”
- Oliver Sacks

“Wherever the art of Medicine is loved, there is also a love of Humanity.”
- Hippocrates

To the caring,

Karimah

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Until 25 Oct 2026 . Free . Walk-up only . Kensington Gardens .

Follow the red brick road, my sweet museum rat, and you'll end up in a café. This year's Serpentine Pavilion, the 25th, handed each year to someone who hasn't built here yet, comes from Isabel Abascal and Alessandro Arienzo, LANZA atelier, Mexico City.

The name is a lovely triple nod: to the winding brick serpentine wall, the Serpentine Lake beside it, and, of course, the pavilion itself. Every summer, the Serpentine invites an architect who has never built in the UK before to create something temporary.

The design borrows from an old English idea called the crinkle-crankle wall which is a gently waving brick wall that supports itself without buttresses. (Although it actually dates back to Egyptian times). Engineered to catch warmth in its curves, the design once used to help fruit trees ripen. Here, there isn’t really a front or back, instead, the walls fold to reveal little rooms and patches of shade. It’s engineering disguised as decoration and vice versa.

“Twenty-six thousand bricks from Surrey, chosen to match the tea pavilion next door.”

The pavilion is built from 26,000 locally made Sienna Red bricks, chosen to echo the Victorian brickwork of Serpentine South next door. Even the timber chairs were made nearby.

I went at the hottest part of the day, iced matcha sweating in hand, and found a spot in the shade. That’s the whole trick of the pavilion, it feels light and airy.

What I loved most, though, wasn’t the architecture itself, but the way people inhabited it, it felt comfortable and alive. Because it was so hot, the pavilion became a refuge. People drifted in for shade, lingered over conversations, met friends, read books and simply sat together. It felt wonderfully Mediterranean/Mexican, which makes sense. LANZA atelier understands what it means to design for warmth: both architecturally but culturally.

And then there are the details. I got close enough to the brick to read it, which most people probably don’t. Pressed into the clay before firing are tiny maker’s numbers. Finding them felt like spotting a signature of craftsmanship.

The chairs deserve a mention too. Made locally from sapele hardwood, they’re beautifully dovetailed and designed so visitors can move them into their own arrangements. The architect in me loved that. You can’t force people to occupy public space; all you can do is create the right conditions and hope chance does the rest.

Museum Rat’s verdict? Worth adding to your London list. If you’re in the area, grab a coffee, wander through and spend half an hour there. It’s one of those annual public art moments that’s worth keeping up with.

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Planning Your Visit

• Website

• Address: Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA

• Opening hours:
  Check the website for the day’s exact hours before you go

• Admission: Entry is free, walk-up only, no booking required

Similar Places

For more of Abascal and Arienzo's home ground, look at Luis Barragán's courtyards in Mexico City. And for something closer to home visit Hauser & Wirth Somerset, where Smiljan Radić’s 2014 Serpentine Pavilion now lives permanently among Piet Oudolf’s gardens

Read next. Last time it was Hurvin Anderson and the view through a barbershop window > Museum Rat #45. More every week at thegremlins.substack.com.

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BORED

BORED

What do we do when nothing is clear?

There are days where nothing is wrong,
but nothing is clear either.
Run, knead, eat, sleep.
Steal from the past that asks us not to return.

Breathe into a future that asks us to be wise.
A fork in the road.
An old flame surfacing.
A new place emerging.

Do we step in or out?

Expand to contract?

What do we do when inaction
is the only action to take?
We take inventory.
We reflect and wait.

What do we do when nothing is clear?

Who will win an AI war?
Will there still be work?
Who raises the children?
Who writes what comes next?

Is it me, or is the world unwell?
Death is guaranteed
Everything else bound at the feet,
Who is truly in love?

All these things,

the children already know.

What do we do when nothing is clear?

Do we panic
just a little?

Scroll.
Force.
Reach for someone
to tell us what comes next.

Or do we pause?
Let time spill upon our bellies.

Offering the kiss of life,

and permission

to breathe.

- Karimah

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From The Factory >

Prompts >

JOURNAL: 1 page. What feels unclear in my life right now?

ASK SOMEONE: What do we do in the moments where nothing is clear?

CREATIVE ACT: Make a blessing box. Write down what is causing you anxiety, fear, or the need for control, place it inside, and hand it over to spirit.

Leave a comment

Musings >

“Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
- Rainer Maria Rilke

“Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red.”
- Kait Rokowski

“Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”
- Mary Oliver

“I always try to follow intuition over logic. Logic is too predictable.”
- Rosalía

With love

Karimah

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Tate Britain
Until 23 August 2026

There are just over two weeks left to see Hurvin Anderson at Tate Britain before the exhibition closes on 23 August. It is the artist’s first major retrospective, bringing together more than eighty paintings spanning over three decades. If you’ve never encountered Anderson’s work before, this is perhaps the perfect place to begin.

Who is Hurvin Anderson?

Hurvin Anderson is one of Britain’s most celebrated living painters. Born in Birmingham in 1965 to Jamaican parents, his work has always existed between two places. Growing up in Handsworth, he inherited Britain as his home and Jamaica as his imagination. Rather than choosing one identity over the other, his paintings inhabit the space between them.

This sense of existing between worlds echoes throughout his compositions. We steal glances through barbershop windows, peer beyond chicken-wire fences and look between dense palm leaves. Sometimes we invited directly into the scene, but often, Anderson positions us as observers in motion; always looking through something, never fully arriving. It mirrors the experience of migration itself: belonging, but never without an awareness of distance.

Anderson doesn’t paint autobiography in a literal sense. His landscapes become emotional rather than geographical, while his interiors become repositories of memory. The longer you spend with each canvas, the more it begins to reveal itself. A woman is affectionately nicknamed Grace Jones, quietly invoking the Jamaican icon. A photograph of Malcolm X hangs beside one of Martin Luther King Jr. in a neighbourhood barbershop. These details arrived as welcome Easter eggs with every discovery; my kind of painter: one who rewards the act of looking.

Leaving the exhibition felt like closing the pages of a beautifully painted family album. Each canvas gathers fragments of personal history, travel, cultural identity and place, layering them until memory itself becomes the subject. Nothing is overstated, yet everything accumulates. By the end, those individual pieces have fused into something inseparable: a rich BRIT-ish collage coming from the UK yet belonging to another world entirely.

Why is this Tate exhibition so significant?

This retrospective feels long overdue. Bringing together more than eighty works from the early 1990s to paintings completed this year, it reveals an artist who has spent three decades returning to the same questions rather than chasing new trends.

The exhibition moves through recurring worlds: Caribbean barbershops, suburban Birmingham streets, Jamaican gardens, and lush landscapes. As each room unfolds, you realise these are not separate series but different chapters of the same conversation. This is why, the paintings are curated according to theme rather than chronologically. Here, if you pay attention you can see how repeated ways of looking manifest throughout his life.

Although Anderson is now considered one of Britain’s defining painters, recognition arrived gradually. Early in his career he resisted expectations that a Black British artist should make overtly political work. Instead, he painted atmosphere and the experience of living between cultures. Such subtlety lends itself to revealing the texture of navigating multiple cultural worlds simultaneously, and it is perhaps why the narratives in his paintings are relatable.

My favourite room was Is It Okay to Be Black? It is undoubtedly the exhibition’s most overtly political moment, yet what stayed with me wasn’t simply the presence of Malcolm X or Martin Luther King Jr. It was how naturally they existed alongside the everyday details of the barbershop. A menu advertising trims and fades is painted directly onto the canvas. The familiar clock hangs on the wall and empty chairs wait for the next customer. Activism and ordinary life occupy the same space.

Anderson reminds us that identity isn’t only shaped by the great figures of history, but equally by neighbourhood conversations and rituals of care we return to week after week. It felt like one of the most honest depictions of the Black British experience I’ve seen; where politics is never separate from everyday life, but woven into it.

The exhibition concludes with a new body of work centred on rafts drifting through tropical landscapes. Inspired by historical photographs from Jamaica, these paintings imagine Black leisure, intimacy and stillness with extraordinary tenderness.

What stayed with me

What stayed with me was Anderson’s expansion of the British landscape.

When we think of British landscape painting, we often inherit images of rolling countryside all Turner and Constable. Anderson asks us to widen what a ‘landscape’ is, especially for inner city living. Because British landscape is also Birmingham barbershops and the Brixton gardens built by Caribbean families is ti not? It’s the memories carried across oceans, where Jamaica continues to shape the lives of those who now call Britain home.

Identity, like painting, is built in layers. We don’t simply leave one place behind and arrive somewhere else; we carry the landscape of our histories with us, allowing them to build the upon the places we inhabit next.

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Planning Your Visit

• Website

• Address: Tate Britain, Millbank, London, SW1P 4RG

• Opening hours:
  Mon - Sun: 10:00am–6:00pm

• Admission: Free

Similar Places

If you like this you’d also like

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

Set on the Øresund coast just north of Copenhagen, Louisiana is renowned for world-class exhibitions that blur the boundaries between art, architecture and landscape

Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA)

Housed inside a transformed grain silo on Cape Town’s waterfront, Zeitz MOCAA is the world’s largest museum dedicated to contemporary African art.

Read Next

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Dreams Have No Titles – Zineb Sedira

A beautifully produced publication accompanying Sedira’s acclaimed 2022 Venice Biennale exhibition. It explores the same ideas found in the Tate Britain Commission: memory, anti-colonial cinema, archives and the power of film to reshape history.

\

“Cinema has always known that images are not only seen. They are carried, shared, passed on.”
- Zineb Sedira

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There’s something about putting pen to paper that makes me feel grown. Not in the way my younger self imagined, all heels and lipstick and independence, nor in the paying-the-bills kind of way. More in the grown sense of being able to regulate myself. As a child I didn’t have the language for that, but I think that’s what I was always reaching towards. Somewhere along the way, pen became keyboard and paper became screen, but the feeling remains. Writing is a place to return to oneself.

I started journaling in 2018 and I’ve barely missed a season since. It became the first place I ever gave myself permission to be radically honest without judgement. What surprised me wasn’t how liberating honesty felt, but how confronting it was to realise how often I had been lying to myself. The contract I made with the page was simple: nothing I wrote had to be acted upon, the only requirement was honesty. That was my gateway into transformation because once I heard a truth I couldn’t unhear it. My caveat (no action is required) meant it was OK for awareness to arrive. For that year it was simply enough to know. The next year I read The Artist’s Way, and kept up with writing ever since.

Painting helps me discover visions and drawing slows my awareness. But words are different, they’re a scalpel to the truth.

Even though I’ve tried different forms of therapy and revere its place, it remains financially out of reach for so many. For that reason, I think the accessibility of journaling is the most UNDERRATED FORM OF SELF DISCOVERY there is. It’s FREE, you don’t need internet, and you can take it anywhere.

It’s why every edition of my newsletter contains journal prompts. Not because I think the Gremlins like writing or feel comfortable around it, but because I think everyone deserves somewhere to tell themselves the truth.

So back to writing. Journaling to be specific.

There is no right way to begin. Do it morning pages style and write three pages of consiousness every morning before your check your phone. Do a brain dump anytime you get overwhelmed and spill your skull onto the page.

Write notes in your phone. Write a letter to your future self and open it on your birthday. Write affirmations and put them in your wallet and make it your screen saver. Write to someone you need to forgive, whether or not you ever send it. The medium matters less than the act, because there is something about moving thoughts from your head into your hands that changes the power we give to them.

And finally, even if you don’t believe writing can change your life, what have you got to lose? As Summer rolls around and everyone else is taking time off, perhaps buy yourself a notebook for the new season. Write something. Read it back. The end. No big deal.

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From The Factory >

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Prompts >

JOURNAL:
Write three pages of by hand. Do it first thing in the morning and write without stopping or editing.

ASK SOMEONE:
Do you keep a journal? Why or why not?

CREATIVE ACT:
Buy yourself a notebook (A6 works well) and carry it with you every day this week. Write in it whenever a thought is worth keeping.

Leave a comment

Musings >

“Morning pages are the most cost-effective therapy I’ve found.”
- Tim Ferriss

“This is a valuable tool to get in touch with their own creativity.”
- Martin Scorsese

“Creativity is always a leap of faith. You’re faced with a blank page, blank easel, or an empty stage.”
- Julia Cameron

“Passion is a tower of flame, but curiosity is a tiny tap on the shoulder.”
- Elizabeth Gilbert

To the honest ones,

With love

Karimah

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Zineb Sedira: When Words Fall Silent, Cinema Speaks

Tate Britain
May 13 2026 - Jan 17 2027

So what is the Tate Britain Commission?

The Duveen Galleries sit at the very centre of Tate Britain. They’re a 90-metre-long sequence of grand neoclassical halls originally designed specifically for sculpture. Every year Tate invites one artist to completely transform this monumental space. Unlike a normal exhibition where artworks are installed in rooms, the artist responds to the architecture itself. Previous artists include Heather Phillipson, Hew Locke, Álvaro Barrington and Phyllida Barlow. It’s become one of the UK’s most prestigious site-specific commissions.

What is happening there right now?

The 2026 commission is by Zineb Sedira. Her exhibition, When Words Fall Silent, Cinema Speaks… is open til next year.

In the 1960s, a wave of African nations began winning independence from European colonial rule. When Algeria gained independence from France in 1962 it became a meeting point for revolutionary thinkers, filmmakers and artists from across Africa, Asia and Latin America. They believed cinema could educate, organise and imagine a different future.

This year’s Tate Britain Commission by Zineb Sedira returns to that extraordinary moment in history. Born in France to Algerian parents and now based in London, Sedira has spent much of her career exploring memory, migration and the afterlives of colonialism. Here, she turns the Duveen Galleries into an immersive celebration of activist cinema, revealing a chapter of film history that sits far beyond the familiar story of Hollywood.

Throughout the installation, cinema becomes a political tool rather than a commercial one. Mobile cinema buses, once used by the French army to screen colonial propaganda across rural Algeria, were reclaimed after independence to share films that helped shape the identity of a new nation. Sedira also pays tribute to La Cinémathèque Algérienne, founded in 1965 as the first film institute of its kind in Africa and the Arab world, where filmmakers gathered to exchange ideas and imagine new possibilities through moving image.

What stayed with me

At its core, the exhibition asks who gets to shape history. Sedira reminds me that cinema is never neutral. Images outlive words, travelling across borders and generations, carrying with them the stories we remember and the ones we choose to forget.

Therefore, cinema does more than document the world; it shapes our collective memory. In an age saturated with moving images, When Words Fall Silent, Cinema Speaks… feels like a warning. What stayed with me in particular was the image of cinema van and how it was repurposed/ reclaimed from French propaganda into Algerian expression. It reminded me that technologies of communication are never inherently good or bad; what matters is who holds them and whose stories they carry.

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Planning Your Visit

• Website

• Address: Tate Britain, Millbank, London, SW1P 4RG

• Opening hours:
  Mon - Sun: 10:00am–6:00pm

• Admission: Free

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Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

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Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA)

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Dreams Have No Titles – Zineb Sedira

A beautifully produced publication accompanying Sedira’s acclaimed 2022 Venice Biennale exhibition. It explores the same ideas found in the Tate Britain Commission: memory, anti-colonial cinema, archives and the power of film to reshape history.

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“Cinema has always known that images are not only seen. They are carried, shared, passed on.”
- Zineb Sedira

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“Essere all’altezza”

Recently I went to an intimate talk with the author Kit de Waal. The intimacy of it deserves an essay of its own.

Today Kit is published by Penguin, her novels are taught on the UK national curriculum, and she travels the world speaking about her work. Looking at her now, it all feels inevitable; success has a nifty way of editing out the years that came before it.

What fascinated me wasn’t where she had arrived, but how she spoke about becoming. At forty-three she decided to write her first novel. After years spent reading the classics, she assumed (in her wonderfully self-deprecating Brummie way) that publication might come quickly. It didn’t, instead it took thirteen years.

As she laughed, so did the room, yet there was nothing naïve about her. She was sharp, funny, hard-headed and formidable. It made me wonder whether what Kit called naivety was actually something closer to possessing faith before visible evidence. Had she known what thirteen years would ask of her, perhaps she would never have begun.

Which reminded me of my dearest soul sister and fellow Gremlin, Sarah, who is half Roman. Months ago she taught me the Italian phrase essere all’altezza: to become equal to what life asks of you. I wrote it down, not knowing when I’d share it with the Gremlins. Today feels like the right day.

I think we often misunderstand what it means to rise. We imagine success arrives in a single moment, as though a book simply appears on a shelf or a career suddenly begins. But nothing appears fully formed; a writer doesn’t simply write a novel, just as a publisher doesn’t simply choose a manuscript. More than 130,000 books are published every year, and behind every one is an invisible architecture of editors, designers, publicists, booksellers and, above all, years of persistence.

As I walked away, I realised how deceptive success can be. From the outside it appears inevitable, almost effortless. From the inside, I suspect it feels much more like becoming: an invisible architecture shaped over years, not by one extraordinary moment, but by thousands of ordinary ones, each quietly adding something to the person who eventually arrives.

One question stayed with me: If a successful life is built this way, what is its smallest unit?

Alan Watts once suggested that a thing is really a think: a unit of thought. It is how we make sense of the world. We divide the continuous flow of reality into things we can recognise, name and hold in the mind.

I began to wonder whether a life is assembled in much the same way.

Perhaps its smallest units are thoughts. Not because a single thought changes a life (it doesn’t), but because thoughts rarely remain thoughts. They become decisions. Decisions, repeated often enough, become habits, habits shape character, and character enlarges our capacity to meet what life asks of us.

We often imagine success transforms a person. I suspect the opposite, because by the time the book reached the shelf, the author had already been written. Thirteen years of persistence, rejection, revision and return had constructed the person capable of writing it.

Perhaps that’s what essere all’altezza means. Not rising above life, nor becoming worthy of a dream, but graduallybecoming equal to what life asks of you.

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From The Factory >

The Road to Essaouira, 2026
211 cm x 140 cm
Acrylic and natural pigment on canvas

Prompts >

JOURNAL:
If someone studied my last thirty days, who would they assume I’m becoming?

ASK SOMEONE:
What habit has changed you more than any single achievement?

CREATIVE ACT:
Read or listen to an artist you admire and study what made them.

Leave a comment

Musings >

“You are getting rid of the habit of thought in which you define yourself in terms of what you’ve done before, and instead… define yourself in terms of what you’re doing now.”
- Alan Watts

“First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not… Habit is persistence in practice.”
- Octavia E. Butler

“Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower and to humanize.”
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

To the readers, love Karimah.

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So what is Barbican?

The Barbican is a concrete city within a city. Built on a part of London almost entirely destroyed during the Blitz, it was designed by architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon as an ambitious experiment in how urban life might be rebuilt. Its raised walkways, towers, gardens, lake and cultural venues were conceived not simply as individual buildings, but as one interconnected world. The Barbican Centre opened in 1982 and now contains galleries, theatres, cinemas, concert halls, a library and a conservatory filled with more than 1,500 species of plants.

It is one of London’s great Brutalist monuments: severe, theatrical and famously difficult to navigate. But that disorientation is part of the experience, I rarely enter the Barbican, see one thing and leave. I wander, cross bridges, find some music escaping from another room and accidentally discover something I had not planned to see.

That is how I encountered Sankofa Carnival.

What is Sankofa Carnival?

Sankofa Carnival is part of the Barbican’s wider Project a Black Planet season, a summer-long programme exploring the influence of Pan-Africanism across visual art, film, music, performance and contemporary culture. The season brings together artists, thinkers and communities from across the African continent and its diasporas, with more than fifty events taking place throughout the building.

The word Sankofa originates with the Akan people of Ghana. It’s often translated as: it is not taboo to go back for what you have forgotten. Its best-known symbol is a bird facing backwards while its body moves forward, retrieving something valuable from the past.

The philosophy is about return as a form of advancement. We look backwards not to remain there, but to recover the knowledge required to move forward with greater dignity.

The installation brings together three UK-based organisations: Mahogany Carnival Arts, IRIE! Dance Theatre and Endurance Steel Orchestra. Through costumes, archival photographs, film, sound, text and workshops, the exhibition examines Carnival as a living artistic language.

Mahogany Carnival Arts creates costumes and large-scale kinetic sculptures using the human body as part of the artwork. Its practice comes from the tradition of Mas—short for masquerade—in which sculpture, costume, choreography, performance and public space meet.

IRIE! Dance Theatre, founded by Beverley Glean in 1985, places African and Caribbean movement traditions within contemporary performance. The photographs in the exhibition show bodies carrying history through gesture: reggae, Kumina, Quadrille, Yanvalou, Buru and Nyabinghi are the foundations from which new movement can emerge.

Endurance Steel Orchestra brings another essential Carnival language: sound!! Founded by Marlon Hibbert, it developed from rehearsals in a family garage and back garden into a professional orchestra and education programme. Its steel-pan repertoire moves between soca, jazz and reimagined classical music. Like dance and Mas, steel pan is presented here not as an accessory to Carnival, but as an art form carrying technical skill, memory and community.

What’s the history behind it?

Carnival’s roots extend through West African and Indigenous cultural practices, carried and transformed by diasporic communities through the violence of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. Across the Caribbean and the Americas, ritual, music, resistance, spirituality, satire and masquerade converged into new public forms.

In Britain, Carnival was shaped by the postwar Caribbean communities invited to help rebuild the country, only to encounter racial violence and discrimination when they arrived. After the racist murder of Kelso Cochrane in 1959, Trinidadian journalist and activist Claudia Jones organised an indoor Caribbean Carnival at St Pancras Town Hall as an act of cultural affirmation and collective resistance.

Outdoor celebrations later developed in Notting Hill, including the 1966 festival organised by local resident Rhaune Laslett. Today, Notting Hill Carnival is one of the world’s largest street celebrations. Its huge, its joy, good food, good vibes and celebration at its finest.

FINALLY

The exhibition is free. The programme culminates in a live Sankofa Carnival performance at the Barbican on 16 August 2026, featuring participants alongside Mahogany Carnival Arts, IRIE! Dance Theatre and Endurance Steel Orchestra.

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Planning Your Visit

• Website

• Address: Barbican, Silk St, Barbican, London EC2Y 8DS

• Opening hours:
  Monday to Friday 8am–11pm

  Saturday and Sunday 9am–11pm

• Admission: Free

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Centre Pompidou, Paris
Europe’s leading museum of modern and contemporary art

Lincoln Center, New York
One of the world’s great performing arts campuses

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The Akan People: A Documentary History

“A people’s art is the genesis of their freedom.”

- Claudia Jones, founded of London’s first Caribbean Carnival

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How do the heavens work?

None of us can truly know. We can study the stars, calculate their movements and give names to invisible forces, yet there is always something that slips beyond explanation. Perhaps that’s why I’ve always been drawn to the idea that the universe is forever trying to teach us about ourselves.

Lately, I’ve been playing with an idea I call Release Orbit.

It goes like this: every chapter of our lives has its own gravitational pull; created by the people around us, our routines, identities, expectations and habits. Together they form an orbit.

An orbit is amazingly efficient; it keeps us moving in familiar circles and we know its rules. An inhabited orbit asks very little of us because we’ve already learnt how to exist within it. The longer we remain there, the less energy it takes to stay. In other words Gremlins, we know who we are inside its boundaries. And even when an orbit no longer serves us, there is comfort in its familiarity. The difficulty comes when we’ve outgrown it.

In physics, a body cannot leave its orbit without first reaching escape velocity. Which means it must generate enough energy to overcome the gravity holding it in place before it can travel towards a new sector of the cosmos.

I wonder if souls move in much the same way.

Perhaps the resistance we feel before a new beginning isn’t evidence that something is wrong, but simply the energy required to leave an old reality behind. What we call procrastination, doubt, fear or the sudden return of old habits may not be obstacles at all. They may be gravity, making one final claim on the life we are preparing to leave.

For years, I mistook this feeling for failure. Whenever life became unexpectedly difficult, I assumed I had taken the wrong path. Now I suspect the opposite is often true - just before escape is when gravity pulls hardest.

I think of running - every personal best demands a disproportionate effort before the body discovers a new normal. I too, think of love - every deeper expression asks us to release an older version of ourselves before we can meet another more fully. Growth is rarely effortless at the threshold and it requires energy before it offers the freedom of space beyond.

And so, put simply ‘Release Orbit’ is my way of verbalising the unseen energy required to overcome the gravity of the life we are leaving behind.

Because once a new orbit is found, our wings (as cheesy as this sounds) can spread farther, and what once demanded extraordinary effort becomes your baseline.

Therefore, perhaps every gremlin that appears at the threshold is only gravity, giving one last tug before letting go.

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From The Factory >

The First Dream Was Blue, 2026
130 cm x 97 cm
Acrylic and natural pigment on canvas

Watch

Prompts >

JOURNAL:
If your current life is an orbit, what would it take to reach escape velocity?

ASK SOMEONE:
Which orbit feels like home, and which one feels like your future?

CREATIVE ACT:
Exercise: Draw your Current Orbit and your Next Orbit. Fill the first with the habits, people, places and identities you inhabit today. Between the two, write the gravity you must overcome to reach escape velocity.

Leave a comment

Musings >

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”
- Albert Einstein

“I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity… and I feign no hypotheses.”
- Isaac Newton

“What else can we understand when we understand gravity?”
- Richard Feynman

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
- Carl Sagan

To the winged ones.
With love,

Karimah

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Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art
21 May - 16 August 2026

So what is Goldsmiths CCA?

Hidden behind the Goldsmiths campus in New Cross sits a South London gem - the contemporary art gallery of CCA. Goldsmiths CCA occupies a restored Victorian bathhouse, redesigned by the Turner Prize-winning architecture collective Assemble. The original tiled walls, exposed pipework and former wash rooms remain, making the building feel less like a pristine white cube and more like a place that has already lived several lives.

It’s also free.

The current exhibition, Flare-Up, brings together nineteen artists exploring illness, disability, neurodivergence and Deafness as lived experiences that shape how we move through the world.

About the show

The exhibition describes crip not as a fixed identity, but as a way of seeing the world. A reclaimed political and cultural term, it asks us to question our assumptions about productivity, independence and even time itself, placing access and care at the centre instead.

Concepts such as crip time - the stretching of normative time under conditions of care, fatigue and access, make way for an expansion of reading the world. Across sculpture, painting, film, poetry, sound and installation, the works move between grief and humour, bureaucracy and beauty, activism and intimacy. Hospital sheets become bunting, department for Work and Pensions letters become drawings, pill boxes are sculpted to the wall and a personal fave giant slug by Abi palmer reframes an animal that once caused phobia into a symbol of slowness.

Rather than presenting disability as something singular, Flare-Up reveals it as something fluid: sometimes painful, sometimes joyful, sometimes invisible and always more complex than our cultural stereotypes allow.

What stayed with me

I kept returning to a concept the exhibition introduces: crip time. The idea that time is not experienced equally, and that the schedules by which many of us measure a successful life are simply one version of time, and not a universal truth.

For someone living with chronic illness or disability, time bends. It stretches, and rearranges itself around symptoms, medication and energy. Therefore progress becomes less about speed and more about capacity.

It made me wonder how many of the expectations we place on ourselves are inherited rather than chosen. Perhaps the measure of a life was never how much we managed to fit inside it, but how attentively we inhabited the moments our bodies allowed us.

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Planning Your Visit

• Website

• Address: Goldsmiths CCA, St James’, New Cross, London SE14 6AD

• Opening hours:
  Wed - Sun: 10:00am–6:00pm
  Mon - Tues: Closed

• Admission: Free

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Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure - Eli Clare

“Crip time is time made flexible enough to meet disabled bodies and minds.”

- Ellen Samuels

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I spent a month in Morocco learning, creating and being stretched. These are some of the ideas I came home with.

• Follow the soul above all else, especially when it asks you to go somewhere you can’t yet explain.

• Every artist deserves one season where the work comes first. Not forever, but long enough to discover what becomes possible when nothing else competes for our attention.

• A residency isn’t a commission. It’s a place to discover something, not prove something.

• Freedom isn’t somewhere we arrive. Each new chapter reveals another invisible rule we’ve been living by.

• Every new chapter asks us for a new self to be born.

• We all seek permission at times. Sometimes another person’s belief in us is enough to remind us of what we already know.

• Finish what’s already on your plate before reaching for the next thing.

• Because sometimes, the next step only reveals itself once we’ve fully honoured the current one.

• Speak to the land before taking from it.

• Colour doesn’t belong to us. It moves through us, filtered by memory, experience and spirit.

• Some paintings arrive through effort, others arrive through surrender, and both belong to the practice.

• Document the process while you’re living it. Memory is a beautiful storyteller, but not always an accurate one.

• There is no single way to build a life in art. Other artists remind us of that.

• Creativity has seasons. Not every day is for making the big work, but every day can feed it.

• Leaving is part of the residency too. Leave knowing you’ve given the place, and the work, everything you had.

• The painting / {your sacred work} almost always knows more than you do. Your job is simply to stay with it long enough to understand what it’s trying to say.

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From The Factory >

‘What The Red City Told Me’ the making of:

Prompts >

JOURNAL:
What conditions bring out my best work?

ASK SOMEONE:
Which artist has stayed with you throughout your life?

CREATIVE ACT:
Collect colours rather than photographs.

Leave a comment

Musings >

“Humans, not places, make memories.”
- Ama Ata Aidoo

“There is another world, but it is in this one.”
- Paul Éluard

“Art simply expresses things that cannot be put into words. It’s a conversation for your eyes, and it makes you look at things differently.”
- Sokari Douglas Camp

“Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”
- Mary Oliver

With love

Karimah

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Frank Bowling, Driven To Draw

25 June to 22 August 2026

So who is Frank Bowling, what is the Royal Drawing School, and what should you expect?

Well my dearest furry creature. Frank Bowling is a British-Guyanese artist and ‘one of the most important abstract painters of his generation’. His work is known for colour, poured paint, and scale. I first encountered his works at a retrospective at the Tate but this exhibition brings his work into a more pocket book, relatable scale. He’s widely known for his ‘map drawings’ and his work around movement. Across more than sixty years, he’s built a practice where drawing and painting often become inseparable.

‘What is the Royal Drawing School’ you ask?

The Royal Drawing School is an independent art school in Shoreditch dedicated to drawing from observation. Side note, I keep applying to get in, and I keep getting rejected. Maybe one day. For now maybe you should shoot your shot and apply too, their masters course is free to enrol and the kind of thing a Gremlin could benefit from. The school offers courses, talks and exhibitions for artists at different stages of their practice. Its focus isn’t just drawing as a skill, but drawing as a way of seeing, and understanding the world. They do great online courses too.

What should you expect?

Frank Bowling: Driven to Draw is a small, intimate exhibition bringing together drawings and works from Bowling’s personal archive, spanning more than sixty years of his practice. It’s not a huge showstopper, but it is a lovely insight into how drawing has supported his work from childhood to now. If you’re into Frank Bowling, it’s special to see some of the quieter, earlier works up close, and it definitely encourages you to go and draw afterwards.

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Planning Your Visit

• Website

• Address: 9–22 Charlotte Road, London EC2A 3SG

• Opening hours:

  Monday–Friday: 10:00am–5:00pm
  Saturday: 10:00am–4:00pm
  Closed Sundays

• Admission:

  Free (booking required)

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The Drawing Room: London’s only gallery dedicated to contemporary drawing, regularly exhibiting artists pushing the medium in new directions.

Read Next

Book: Frank Bowling, Elena Crippa

“A large painting makes a claim. A drawing keeps it close.”

- Sir Frank Bowling

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How To Make The Most Of An Artist Residency

Last week, in Part I, I wrote about what an artist residency actually is, and where to find one. This week is the practical guide.

Over the past few years I’ve been lucky enough to spend time on residencies in New York, Tuscany and most recently Morocco. Each one has taught me something different, but together they’ve helped me develop a way of working that makes every residency more enjoyable. Some of these lessons I learnt the easy way. Most I learnt the hard way.

Whether you’re an artist, writer, designer or simply someone stepping away from everyday life to make something, I hope this saves you a few mistakes.

BEFORE YOU LEAVE

The first thing I’d say is this: your residency doesn’t begin doesn’t begin when your plane lands, it begins a week or two beforehand. I now spend a week preparing, so I can spend more time making work when I arrive.

One exercise has become non-negotiable. Before every residency I open a blank page in my notebook and write one question across the top. What would success look like? And then I write everything I want to achieve.

Before Morocco my success list looked something like this:
- Leave with six paintings I’m genuinely proud of.
- Make three meaningful long-term connections.
- Give back to the land
- Return home healthier than I arrived.

The second thing I prepare is my archive. My laptop already has folders waiting for it: Process, Studio, Finished Works, Details, Portraits, Video and Writing. It sounds almost boring to mention folders in an essay about creativity, but small systems remove hundreds of tiny decisions.

I order materials ahead of time in the land where I am going. This is because a lot of places don’t have good art supply stores so sometimes delivery can take 3-4 weeks.

I also spend a little time researching where I’m going. I pin museums, galleries, cafés, walks, libraries and bookshops onto a map, especially if I am goign somewhere and there isnt good access to internet.

Finally, I think about the practical questions most of us leave until the end. How am I getting the paintings home? Who owns the rights to the work?

CHECKLIST

1. Write what success looks like.

2. Order materials

3. Research museums, galleries and walks.

4. Build folders for the work - images, video, press releases, inventory and social media.

5. Reach out to one or two local artists.

6. Empty camera cards and hard drive.

7. Pack a sketchbook, tape measure and tripod.

8. Think about how the work will travel home.

DURING THE RESIDENCY

Every Residency Has a Rhythm

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learnt is that every residency has its own rhythm. I now think of them like seasons: spend the first few days walking, researching and sketching, knowing that real momentum usually arrives around the end of the first week. Once it does, protect it fiercely, then use the final few days not to start more work, but to finish, measure, title and archive everything before you leave.

The pattern usually looks like this:

Days 1–3: Walk, research, sketch and settle in.

Week 1–2: Protect your making time. This is where momentum arrives.

Final Week: Finish, measure, title and photograph the work.

Last 2–3 Days: Archive everything before you leave.

CHECKLIST

• Give yourself a simple daily rhythm

• Keep office hours. A residency is freedom, but paradoxically freedom needs structure.

• Make notes constantly.

• Leave your phone in another room when you’re working.

• Walk every day.

• Eat with other residents. Some of the best ideas happen over dinner rather than in the studio.

• Don’t feel guilty for taking afternoons away from the studio. Looking is part of making.

DOCUMENTING THE WORK

If you only remember one thing from this newsletter, let it be this: never rely on somebody else to document your work.

People get busy, photographers cancel, or licenses change and you are restricted access to your own work! I’ve experienced every version of it. Today every finished painting is photographed, both detail and full length shots, filmed from process to end, measured, titled and logged.

We’re living in a time where most people will encounter our work on a screen before they ever encounter it in person. Documentation isn’t separate from the practice anymore. It’s part of the practice!!

CLOSING

One habit I’ll never skip again is leaving two or three days after a residency before jumping back into normal life. Use that time to travel home, unpack, clean your space, throw things away and let yourself integrate. Every residency changes you in some small way, and I’ve learnt that the home needs a moment to catch up with the person who returns.

Leave The Residency Before You Publish It

This is a habit I’ve only developed recently. When I make something I’m excited about, my instinct is to post it immediately. Now I almost never do. Instead, everything goes into an archive.

The distance helps so that by the time I look again a week or two later, I know which photographs really hit. More importantly, delaying the urge to publish keeps me present while I’m away. I’d rather experience the residency than constantly narrate it.

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From The Factory >

What the Red City Told Me
2026
Acrylic and natural pigment on canvas
131 × 97 cm

Prompts >

JOURNAL:
If you could disappear somewhere for two weeks to make something, where would you go?

ASK SOMEONE:
When have you felt most creatively alive?

CREATIVE ACT:
Make your own “What Success Looks Like” list for your next project.

Leave a comment

Musings >

“The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.”
- Robert Henri

“Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.”
- Twyla Tharp

“The aim of art is not to represent the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.”
- Aristotle

Love always

Karimah

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The Moroccan Museum Where Every Artist Leaves Something Behind

The Montresso Foundation in Morocco is more than just a museum. I would know, I spent the past month living there. Rather than preserving art after it’s been made, Montresso invests in the conditions that allow it to happen in the first place.

Founded in 2009, the foundation sits about an hour outside Marrakech and has become one of the most ambitious contemporary art spaces in Africa. It isn’t a traditional museum where you arrive, walk around and leave an hour later. Instead, its a working foundation that commissions and collects art, curates exhibitions, publishes books, runs an international artist residency and supports artists through every stage of making. Many of the works are also available to purchase, so it sits somewhere between a museum, gallery, residency and cultural foundation.

When I arrived I expected to find an artist residency attached to a museum. However, the museum is only one part of it. Spread across thirteen hectares, there are studios, exhibition spaces, offices, metal and wood workshops, staff, technicians, animals, trees and artists…. along with a publishing house, and a sculpture park. And so, in some strange way, it feels like a small village.

Every few days, the rhythm of the place changed when some artists left and others arrived. Most stayed for around a month, and we came from across the world bringing completely different ways of making with us. There were ceramicists, photographers, painters, sculptors, recently graduated artists, artists who had been working for decades and even former street artists. Everyone arrived with their own practice, but they all left having shaped the place in some way.

French and Arabic were the languages I heard most often, but making became the common language. You could sit at dinner beside someone you had barely spoken to all day and still feel that you understood something about them. Maybe because everyone had spent the day alone with their own work.

What makes Montresso* special is that it doesn’t only show just finished art. It supports everything that comes before it. Behind every finished piece are weeks of doubt, conversation, technical knowledge, material, failure and persistence. Here, all of those things are given space to exist.

The workshops are a huge part of that. Artists have access to specialist metal and wood workshops, often making work that would be impossible in their own studios. Many choose to leave a sculpture behind, so over the years the grounds have slowly become an open-air collection in their own right. You walk between peacocks, donkeys, dogs, cats, birds and olive trees before turning a corner to find another sculpture emerging from the landscape. It feels as though every resident leaves a small piece of themselves behind.

After a month there, I understood that Montresso is unique in that it gives space for artists to explore without forcing an outcome - which is surprisingly rare. Most institutions meet the work at the end, when it’s finished and ready to explain. Montresso meets it much earlier, when it (and the artist) is still uncertain. Being part of the process reminded me that the most important thing an art institution can do is not only preserve culture, but create the conditions for culture to keep moving.

Topline

Because Montresso sits outside Marrakech, it is a destination rather than somewhere you stumble across. If it is your first visit to the city, you will probably want to spend time in the medina, visit the Yves Saint Laurent Museum or MACAAL first. But if you are interested in contemporary art, and especially in what is happening across Morocco and the wider African art scene, Montresso is one of the most rewarding places you can visit. It offers something those institutions cannot: the chance to witness the work before it enters the museum.

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Planning Your Visit

Website

• Address: Montresso* Art Foundation, J58J+V38, N8, Marrakech 40000, Morocco.

• Opening hours: Wed–Sat, 10am–4pm (by appointment only).

• Admission: 100 MAD for adults. Children under 16 visit free. Guided tours last around 90 minutes.

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Montresso Art Foundation, by Estelle Guillié, View

“I too would build a garden of happiness.”

- Niki de Saint Phalle

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Over the past month, I’ve been undertaking a residency at the Montresso Foundation, Morocco. People often ask me what an artist residency is. When I tell them, “At its simplest, it’s a place you go to make work,” I’m usually met with a slightly confused look, and rightly so. In my experience, residencies can sit anywhere between a monastery and a travelling circus.

Like most things in the arts, residencies vary enormously. Some are highly competitive and project-led. Others are more exploratory, offering space to experiment and discover what emerges. Both have their place and one is not inherently better than the other.

The framework is surprisingly loose. Some residencies last a week, others a month or two. Some provide accommodation, studio space and materials, while others simply offer a room and leave the rest to you. Occasionally flights are covered, though this is rarer than artists would like. Sometimes you pay to attend, particularly earlier in your career. Other times the organisation funds your stay in exchange for a piece of work or a contribution to its collection.

The medium hardly matters; writers, painters, photographers, composers, filmmakers, dancers and musicians all attend residencies. The common denominator is not the discipline but the intention. You go somewhere with the sole purpose of creating.

What most people misunderstand is that residencies aren’t holidays. An artist residency is less a retreat than an incubation, because you arrive with questions and leave with different ones.

I know, the photographs might suggest otherwise. Pictures of olive groves in Tuscany or palm trees in Marrakech. Yet the reality is much closer to what happens when a musician disappears to make an album. You wake up, work. You stop for lunch, work again, stop for dinner and you work some more.

The real value lies not in the accommodation or the scenery, though both can be wonderful. It lies in removing yourself from the ordinary demands of life. (Fewer obligations and fewer distractions.) The work is no longer squeezed into the edges of the day but it becomes the day.

There’s also the matter of community. Depending on the residency, you may find yourself surrounded by artists from entirely different disciplines and backgrounds. When I first spent time in New York, being around other artists was more transformative than the studio itself. Watching how they lived, worked and sustained a creative life gave me permission to imagine one for myself.

Therefore, a residency is about both the place you travel to, and the version of yourself that emerges when the work is given top priority.

For anyone interested in applying, opportunities appear in more places than ever. Dedicated platforms such as Artendacirculate open calls internationally, while organisations such as the Arts Council and residency programmes including Gasworks, PLOP, MAK and so many more have long supported artists seeking time and space to develop their work. Increasingly, social media has become a useful tool too.

And, of course, there is nothing stopping an artist from creating their own residency. GOD MOMENTUM is this in living form. Rent a room, borrow a studio and switch off your phone. Commit to a body of work. Not everyone has the discipline for such self-imposed structures, which is perhaps why formal residencies remain so valuable. They create a container for seriousness.

So that, broadly speaking, is what an artist residency is:

1. A temporary relocation in service of a creative practice.

2. A pause from ordinary life.

3. An incubation chamber for ideas.

Next week I’ll share what that experience taught me. For now, I’ll let you finish what’s on your plate.

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From The Factory >

Prompts >

JOURNAL:
What would my ideal residency look like if I designed it myself?

CREATE:
Design your own residency and put it in your calendar between now and June 2027.

• GUIDANCE

  - Name

  - Location

  - Duration

  - Start date

  - End date

  - Deliverables

  - Constraints

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Musings >

“You do not have to become anything. You only have to remember what you are.”
- Toni Cade Bambara

“I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.”
- Audre Lorde

“I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart.”
- Vincent Van Gogh

With love

Karimah

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Passages, Marion Boehm

Loft Art Gallery had been on my list for weeks. Every artist I met in Marrakech seemed to mention it in passing, so one afternoon I wandered over to Guéliz to finally see it for myself.

Originally founded in Casablanca before expanding to Marrakech, Loft has established itself as one of Morocco’s leading contemporary galleries, representing artists from across the continent and beyond while playing an active role in the city’s growing cultural landscape.

The current exhibition, Passages, is a solo presentation by Marion Boehm. Working across personal narratives and broader social histories, Boehm explores the relationships between African and Western cultures and the histories that continue to shape contemporary life.

At first glance, the works appear photographic. The people in Boehm’s work are are drawn from a mix of encounters, photographs, and portraiture developed over many years, particularly after she moved to South Africa in 2010 and began working with communities in Johannesburg, including Kliptown.

The photographs are layered with paint and stitched together with thread; from the side one can see how the flat surface becomes sculptural. There is something archaeological about the process, as though each work has been built through accumulation rather than simply composed.

Boehm’s material language feels inseparable from the ideas she explores. The stitching becomes both a method of repair, while the layering of photographic and painterly elements reflects the way identity is built through movement and lived experience. The works are neither painting nor photography, but something suspended between the two.

The pacing of the exhibition was generous. Each floor unfolded naturally into the next, giving every work room to breathe.

The building itself adds to the feeling of space. Spread across three light-filled floors, the gallery feels both intimate and expansive. I found myself wandering back through rooms I’d already visited, noticing details I’d missed the first time around. Those are usually my favourite galleries: the ones where I want to do a quick a second lap.

Marrakech’s art scene has gathered remarkable momentum over the past decade. Loft Gallery sits between local and international conversations. It offers a place where contemporary art feels considered and deeply connected to the city around it.

I left inspired, not only by the exhibition itself, but by the sense that Marrakech is an exciting place to encounter contemporary art right now.

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How to visit

Website

• Loft Art Gallery, Marrakech

  60 Bd el Mansour Eddahbi, Marrakech 40000, Morocco

• Opening Times

  • Monday: 3–7 pm

  • Tues - Sat, 10 am–1 pm, 3–7 pm

  • Sunday, Closed

More Reading

• What is a Soul Scape?

• Tribute to Marion Boehm

“The other becomes a fragment of the mirror of our own self.”

- Marion Boehm

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