Baroque To The Future ( V&A Friday Late)

It's been seventeen years since I first moved to London in 1999; the same year that the Victoria and Albert Museum started its Friday Late views, on the last Friday of every month – a series of ever-changing, curated programmes of live performances, cutting-edge fashion, film, installations, debates, special guests and DJs, with bars, food, and late-night exhibition openings.

So it seems quite apt that my last London exhibition before I leave the Capital next month (and re-locate my practice to a much larger studio space up in Shropshire) should be at this month's Friday Late, Baroque to the Future - the theme being Europe, Baroque and the Future. Not that this will be my last London exhibition; just the last one before I move studio.

Taking place this Friday, Baroque to the Future will be on from 6:30-10:00pm, and my sculptures will be installed at the bottom of the National Art Library staircase, inside the museum's Sculpture Gallery. Orifice Tower and Sleeping Beauty Box will be among some of the pieces that I will be showing, as well as salvaged sections (now in a temporary display structure) from my cabinet of curiosities sculpture, The City, which was unfortunately destroyed back in 2011, when it was lent to a Trove exhibition in Birmingham. But once I relocate to the new studio I am finally going to have the time to work on a new, and hopefully bigger, version.

Baroque to the Future

The Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington, London SW7 2RL

Friday 29 April

18.30 – 22.00

April's Friday Late invites Amy Grimehouse with Late Night Library Club to explore the Europe 1600-1815 Galleries, and celebrate the influence of European culture as the possibility of Brexit looms.

Listen in on courtly gossip, participate in Versailles dance-offs, and marvel in encyclopaedic knowledge of power and revolution in Europe.

Drop by and singalong to Napoleonic pop songs and enter the V&A's very own Eurovision song contest. Nil point?

RCA Secret 2016 Reveal

The Royal College of Art has gone for a slightly different format this year with regards to its annual RCA Secret postcard exhibition. Instead of the usual one day sale, it's now decided to stretch it over a few days. The Dubai version of the exhibition took place last month (16-19 March 2016) during Art Dubai, at Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai, but the London one, at the college's Gulbenkian Galleries in Kensington Gore, is still on (ending 15th April - collection day 16th April).

Although the exhibition doesn't end for a few days yet I think that it's probably okay if I now reveal which pieces were mine – partly because I've already been contacted by the three art collectors (two from London, and one from Dubai) who each bought one of my 'postcards', and because when the show does finally end, I'll be sunning myself on an island in the Maldives, so won't want to be messing about with social media and updating blog posts etc (selfish, I know).

For those of you who don't know about the RCA Secret, it is a show of around 2000 original postcard-sized artworks by 'internationally acclaimed artists, designers, cultural icons, alumni, and up-and-coming graduates', exhibited between two venues – the Upper Gulbenkian Gallery, Royal College of Art, Kensington, London and 500EAD in Dubai, with all the proceeds going to the RCA Fund, providing scholarships and bursaries for students. And the secret part of it, I hear you ask? Well, each postcard is exhibited anonymously, with the creator only being revealed once the card has been bought by its collector.

Every year the college throws a thank you party for the contributing artists. This year's was on Friday, just gone, and all I'll say is that their generosity with the refreshments meant that, for me, the following day was pretty much a write off. In this photo, taken by one Mister Adam Stone (now the proud owner of one more of my RCA Secret postcards), shows me looking at one of the two pieces that are still on show at the London leg of the RCA Secret. The show allows for sculptural postcard entries, although I may have taken it a bit far this year, as the piece had to be laid on its back, so that it didn't stick up in front of the row of cards above it.

You can't see from the photos, but each of the pieces that I made for this year's shows has a mirror inside the top box section, viewable through the carved orifice section at the front of the box. So when you look inside, you see an eye staring back at you - but not always the eye that you might be expecting!

RCA Secret 2016
Royal College of Art, Kensington
Kensington Gore
London SW7 2EU

Exhibition
8–15 April, 11am – 6pm

Late opening
13 and 15 April, until 8pm

Sale
10 April, 8am – 6pm
11–15 April, 11am – 6pm

COLLECTION DAY 16 April, 9am – 5pm
Free admission