This photo is part of a series I’m calling Grave Art that I’m exhibiting at Dulwich Artists’ Open House. It will hang along side colourful abstract paintings by Caroline Wright and figurative textile art made by Louise Baldwin. Showing photos taken in cemeteries is an odd choice. I mean, who, in heaven’s name, would buy one? They probably won’t. But, the photography may begin a few conversations.

Comfort

This photo is currently on show at the South London Women Artists’ exhibition at Bankside Gallery (next to Tate Modern),  until Monday, 7 May. As it’s such a wet Bank Holiday, perhaps the public will pop in for shelter, for art and even a little comfort. On Sunday at 3pm at Bankside I’ll be doing stand-up poetry with Pia Randall-Goddard and Helen Adie (together we comprise Three Sheets In The Wind). All welcome.

No flies on him?

I admit I was predisposed not to like Damien Hirst’s exhibition at Tate Modern, so in that sense it didn't disappoint. It’s big stuff and it’s boys’ stuff. The severed head of a cow in its pool of blood serving the appetites of flies set to die in a fly-killing contraption is ‘amazing’, as one guy said. And, that is the tone of the show. A vast array of pharmaceuticals is amazing, so, too, is a golden case of glinting diamond-like objects; bisected cows (inspiring people to biology disquisitions) and sharks (quite small ones) in tanks and a great big bull’s-eye design on the wall made up of flies, all amazing. The Jacuzzi-size ashtray full of butt ends is… Anyway, then there are the butterflies. Thousands of them provide the material for mandala-like 2-D works and then passing the ashtrays, one reaches the room where live butterflies flutter and fall about. What should be uplifting, isn’t. One of the last rooms? A shop for DH paraphernalia. I bought two postcards: one of them of a hairdryer keeping a ping-pong ball afloat in the air, entitled ‘What Goes Up Must Come Down’. A comment on the value of Hirst’s work? I read that a Qatari customer spent £9.7m acquiring Hirst’s pill cabinet, Lullaby Spring. The show at Tate is sponsored by the Qatar Museum’s Authority. If you pay a lot, it makes sense to protect your investment.

Kissing, romance, passion, tenderness

Rodin’s ‘The Kiss’ is at the Turner Gallery in Margate until September. The live couple will have moved on, but for a moment they appeared to vaguely echo the romance of the sculpture, albeit without the ripple of passion but with some of the tenderness.

Freedom?

Freedom's just another word for... toilet paper. Window display in a Margate corner shop.

The photo not taken

Not taken because I didn’t have my camera with me -- three or four people sat at a table in the sunshine outside a fish and chip shop. A life-size model of a grey heron stood on an adjoining table to which it was padlocked. The fish shop owner was outside and joking with his customers; everyone was laughing. I know them by sight; two of them are people ‘in the community’ who, in another age, might have been in residential care. To be honest, I would have loved to have photographed the scene, but there would have been something Diane Arbus (known for her photos of ‘marginal people’) about it. You see I wasn’t only drawn to the peculiarity of the heron and the rotund fish fryer but the eccentric appearance of the care-in-the community couple. By taking a photo I would have intruded on their afternoon’s conviviality. And there would have been something exploitative about it. I will, though, remember that photo not taken for quite some time.

Dodgy broilers

Steaming hot day and Rye Lane is packed with shoppers and dawdlers. I’m one of them. I spot the sign in one of the many butchers where broiler chickens hang by their feet, ready for the pot. As I took the photo, three guys behind the one in the foreground turned away, not wanting to be captured.