(sorry the picture quality isn't great)

They also had a couple of pieces of original artwork. I don't know who did this one:

Elsewhere, I spotted this fantastic bit of packaging. I love the hand-drawn lettering. So fun!

More Margate photos here.

Last bank holiday Monday some friends and I went to "the original seaside", as Margate is now billing itself, to see the new Turner Contemporary. It looks a bit shed-like when you exit the station, but because it's the same height as the other buildings around it, it doesn't seem intrusive (it actually looks lower than it does in my photo, which is zoomed and cropped).

It's a rather nice space inside, not very big, but light and cool. Charles Holland has written a good review of it here, which saves me having to say much else.

The day we were there the seafront was heaving with bikers there for the Margate Meltdown, with lots of stalls, and pub rock bands, and gawkers. It was the most crowded I'd seen the place (but then again I've never been there in the height of the season before).

There were lots of bikes parked outside the gallery, framed here by Daniel Buren's already iconic stripes. (The huge windows overlooking the sea are fantastic.)

After visiting the Turner, I dragged my friends off to the Shell Grotto (no visit to Margate is complete without it), where I was temporarily adopted by the very friendly Grotto Cat.

And then a stroll around town, where we discovered that Limbo is situated between a Burton shop and a KFC.

And there was plenty of bunting. Bunting is definitely the "in" thing this year. I'd like to blame That Wedding, but it was popping up all over the place long before that. The high street was full of bright fluttering flags, which couldn't hide the fact that so many of the shops have closed down (but on the plus side, there were some new, independent ones which had opened up since I was there last year). I liked the two-tone chequered bunting outside the mod shop, and the orange-and-black bunting along the route of the bikefest, as well.

A day at the seaside requires ice cream, so we headed off to get some at Carter's Steam Fair, which was set up in the Dreamland car park. Unfortunately, it started raining as soon as we walked in through the gates, so we didn't stay long, and the rain only got harder when we left. With a bit of time before the next train back to London, we took shelter in a cafe in Buenos Ayres.

(It wasn't as nice as the cafe we had lunch in, a proper classic caff with red leatherette booths called Kalli's, where a cup of tea, scrambled egg, proper crispy bacon and mushrooms on toast came to the princely sum of three quid. Brilliant.)

Then back to the train station, with barely enough time to admire the lovely station ceiling, and on to the fast train home to London in the rain.

It wouldn't have been a proper Whitsun bank holiday without some rain, I suppose. And speaking of bank holidays, I was amused and interesting to read this piece on Margate and bank holidays a couple of days later.

More photos from the day (with more to come) here. All my Margate photos are here. You can read about previous visits to Margate here and here.

This week the Grant Museum re-opened in a new location, although if you were to visit the new venue and didn't know it was a new venue, it wouldn't be at all obvious.

Housed in an Edwardian library, a double-height room with a balcony on the second level, it feels as though the collection had always been there, with the only modern addition being a few discreet iPads dotted around the room, and some bright green chairs which look a bit out of place, because they are quite a distracting colour.

But they aren't the main draw, so easy enough to ignore in favour of peering into wooden cabinets filled with jars of moles and monkey skulls.

There are some slightly creepy/humorous examples of wonky Victorian taxidermy — it's hard not to anthropomorphise animals that have been given dolls' eyes and funny expressions.

The signage is sometimes funny, too, in a very deadpan way that may in fact be dryly serious. This is not a brain, in case you had any doubts:

Other labels offer philosophical questions — mostly about the running of museums — for example whether it's OK to display animal remains if they can't give their consent, or what makes a bulldog a uniquely British icon.

I like the way you can "adopt" an item in the collection, and have your name displayed on a label, although it's a bit annoying when the label covers the item so much you can't see it properly.

They also have a few lovely examples of glass sea creatures made by the Blaschka brothers. Their work is always incredible to look at — especially when you consider nobody knows how they did it.

More photos here.
More reviews: culture24, Wired UK, Londonist, Hayley Campbell.

visiting the Grant Museum of Zoology
The Grant Museum is in the Rockefeller Building, 21 University Street, just off Gower Street, five minutes walk from Euston Square or Warren Street tube stations. Bus routes 24, 29, 73 and 10 stop across the road, outside the UCL main quad. Entry to the museum is free, but the museum is only open Monday-Friday 1:00pm-5:00pm. Worth a visit in your lunch break, though.

I love the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill, although I don't visit it often enough because it's on the opposite side of London to me. A little while ago I happened to pass it on a bus, so I jumped off to have a quick look around, for the first time in a couple of years.

One of the things I have always loved about the place are the old-fashioned wooden cabinets full of stuffed animals. I know lots of people find stuffed animals creepy, but I like them in museums (not so much in houses), especially the ones made in Victorian times when they didn't always know what they were doing. I love the famously overstuffed walrus and his intimidating tusks, for example. He's been a fixture of the museum forever; when I was taking pictures there was an old lady telling her tiny granddaughter how she used to come and see him when she was a little girl. I hope the little girl gets to grow up and take her children to see him, too!

(I've just remembered that one of the most horrifying things things I have ever seen was some violent and extremely bloody footage of a male walrus rampaging on a beach, killing his own young. I'm quite glad I couldn't find that online just now.)

Other animals seem to have been done with a more knowledgeable hand, making them look as though they might even jump through the glass any moment now….

This spectacled elephant shrew is waiting to become a stop-motion animation star any day now…

This proboscis monkey looks just like my old English teacher, Mr Hoskins (he didn't have ginger hair, but he did have a big nose, sticky-out ears, sideburns and a perpetually bemused expression).

Some people might find the labelling and display of the natural history section old-fashioned, but I'm always struck by how well-designed it actually is. The lettering is always readable, and the evolutionary differences and similarities are made clear with an immediate glance that is so helpful! (Thanks to I like for use of these pics)

photo by i like

photo by i like

Sometimes the old-fashioned quality accidentally works in favour too. I giggled when I noticed the cabinet full of bird photos, because the photo of the dodo has faded, giving that part of the chart a ghostly quality that's utterly appropriate for an extinct bird.

As I arrived fairly close to closing time, I didn't have enough time to go around all of the other parts of the museum, but I popped into the African room, where I found these ace statuettes of big cats. Don't you just love their expressions?

More photos here.
More reviews here and here.

Visiting the Horniman Museum
The Horniman Museum & Gardens are at 100 London Rd in Forest Hill, south London. Entry to the museum is free. There are directions on the museum's website, but I find the easiest way to get there from central London is to take one of the buses that stops right outside: either the 176 from Charing Cross Road or the 185 from Victoria.

Even if I go out exploring with the intention of taking photos, it can be a bit intimidating being under constant and suspicious scrutiny by locals passing by, especially when I'm on my own. I tend to get a bit self conscious if I'm wandering around on my own in bits of London that don't often see people waving their cameras on street corners, and leave without having taken any photos at all (which only half defeats the purpose of the project, since I am at least exploring many parts of the city I have never seen).

It recently occurred to me that I could of course take photographs in a number of museums (at least the ones that let you take photos), and that this would be a decent way to visit new boroughs and support local museum culture, especially as it is in the slow process of being destroyed by our utterly philistine government and in a few cases won't be around for much longer. So I've scribbled a (probably incomplete) list of all the boroughs — and their museums — in my notebook. Whether I do indeed get to all of them this year remains to be seen of course, but I've already visited a few. Posts and pictures to come…

Incidentally, if you can recommend any interesting places (not limited to museums) to go and take photographs — especially in the outer boroughs — please let me know!

Last month I went to a great, if small, exhibition of influential designer Barney Bubbles' work, at the tiny Chelsea Space gallery. Although it's a subject arguably deserving of a much larger overview — at the Design Museum, for example — it was dense with inspiring imagery, including working proofs and glimpses into sketchbooks. I took some pictures on my phone, which you can see here (they're very blurry, so you should really check out the work on Reasons To Be Cheerful). 

My favourite part was seeing his process of ideas, from taking inspiration from old newspaper illustrations, to experiments noted in his sketchbooks. 

One sketchbook in particular was opened to the description of an intriguing artistic experiment Bubbles undertook at home with a friend, during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

This is a transcription of his notes (which tantalisingly break off because I couldn't turn the page of a sketchbook on display in a glass cabinet). The comics fan in me found his musings on the relationship between images and words of particular interest (emphasis mine): 

"An interesting experiment in visual and oral arts. Nothing is more important to artists than the 4-dimensions. I tried to achieve this by drawing, painting, reading, talking, etc (in fact in length, breadth, depth tried to assimilate a piece of time that is coming, has come and is now gone and must be caught for always) similar to the Chinese artist poets. The time, Sat. 27 Oct. 1962. The location. My house at Whitton. We played "Thelonious at Blackhawk", "Beethoven's 5th", and read Tennyson. I painted between 8 o/c and 9.30 o/c, interspersed with writing these notes and talking. We talked about boyfriends and girlfriends, and leather coats, and college at Birmingham, and the Royal College of Art. And we wrote poetry as the mood took us. 
_________________________
N.B. 1st point. We came to the conclusion that writing and painting are the same thing, so that one leads on to the next and necessarily helps the other. Building up inevitably to a climax. Which in our case was a discussion of Religion, black magic, Cuba and the planes that flew over from London Airport. Why can't writing be on  a canvas to help the painting? The visual helps the spectator, while the writing acting as a sort of scrapbook, grips his attention and allows the painting to set the exact location and spread the action over a series of moments.
_________________________
The next logical step would seem to be a painting trying to convey movement by any means possible. A painting done quickly is fresh, infintely more interesting and is capable of movement. Actions are fast, angular, sharp, vicious or can be lazy, sensuous and slow yet both create mood and help the –"

I wish I could find out what his conclusions were — if he made any. There was a nice portrait of the friend who spent the day working with him:

There's a great overview of the exhibition, with more pictures, at Creative Review.

Meet Sunday George who went off to have an adventure at the Wellcome Collection, where he was officially registered by the artist Keith Wilson, and given a dedicated calendar date of his own. February 11th is Sunday George Day, so remember to celebrate with robots!

You can see more pics here, and see the whole Things calendar here. Check it out; there are some great little stories to discover. Here are some of my own favourite things.

Last week I went to a preview of a great exhibition of Hypercomics, which has filled Battersea Park's Pump House Gallery with magical mystery and multi-directional narrative. There are strange deer-like creatures dancing on windows, blood-red masks, choose-your-own-adventure comic strips, and a comical-medical library of London, full of fake books with titles like Interesting Awning Eyelids of the Ritz Hotel And Like Edifices or Cough Cough Cough: Bus Tales.

Each floor of the gallery features a different artist working to tell stories in a completely different way, starting with Warren Pleece's animation on the ground floor, and moving upstairs via Daniel Merlin Goodbrey's multi-directional comic strips, and Dave McKeans multi-media installation, up to Adam Dant's work on the top floor. It's a great demonstration of the many different ways words and imagery can combine to tell a story.

There are also a series of outsize comics panels down in the shelter by the lake, featuring various takes by several artists, on the mythical Battersea Park Free Festival, which may or may not have actually taken place in 1974.

Here are some more photos from the night. First up here's Ed Hillyer, Warren Pleece, Woodrow Phoenix and Etienne Gilfillan on the top floor, looking over Dave McKean's installation. Ed and I ended up having a rather disgusting conversation about gallstones, which was spurred on by some of the titles of the books in Adam Dant's Doctor London installation, including discussing whether or not the removal of a gallstone was what killed Samuel Pepys. (Actually, Pepys had kidney stones, but we got them mixed up, although the conversation so disgusted us that neither of us wanted to pursue it.)

Here's Dave McKean. I was taking this picture for the juxtaposition of the two bottles when I realised he was standing behind his sculpture. (This narrative was a bit of a fiddle to follow!)

Here's Sarah McIntyre looking through one of the windows.

The windows have pictures on them which line up with the trees outside if you stand in the right place.

I'm going to have to go back and give all the stories the time and attention they deserve. Fortunately, I already have plans to go back this Sunday, because it's the day of the summer Comiket, and the list of exhibitors looks fantastic. See you there?

Instead, one thing I decided to do was go and check out this year's Serpentine Pavilion. (It is hard and shiny and very very red and the cafe is expensive and there's not really much more to be said about it. I also popped into the Serpentine Gallery as I am wont to do when I am in the area, but the Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition was pretty dull.) When I got off the bus outside the Albert Hall, I noticed that there was an exhibition of Roman Cieślewicz posters at the Royal College of Art. I'd been interested in seeing it but I thought it had already closed, so that was a nice surprise (it closed at the weekend though).

The exhibition was good fun. Cieślewicz had a varied career, designing book covers and film posters in Poland in the 50s and 60s, as well as working for all sorts of magazines and institutions when he moved to Paris. There was a strong use of collage which I found quite inspiring and I was looking forward to going home and creating something, when I came into the last room and found a collage workshop taking place. So I collected some printouts of various source images, sat myself in a corner with some scissors and glue and got my art on!

This poster is the first piece I glued down, though it wasn't my first collage idea but more like my third or fourth. The other ones weren't working for me because the pieces were all printed on different-coloured paper and some were awkward sizes and it wasn't as coherent as I wanted. But once I started on this piece it came together really quickly. (the colours came out a bit weird on the camera but it's too big for my scanner!).

After that, I made this one, from just four pieces — see if you can spot the individual elements.

I also took some photos of some of the other collages because I thought they were brilliant.

This fishman was made by the women running the workshop. I later found out one of them was Natsko Seki whose illustration has made the design-blog rounds a few times recently. (The other woman was from Finland but I didn't find out her name.)

This one was done by a teenage boy who kept making it bigger and bigger until it was about half his size.

It's a shame I can't give anyone a proper credit for the rest of these

And here's one last picture, a remixed version of my first collage poster. I ran it through Plastic Bullet when I was feeling bored, and this was my favourite result because it looks like it was taken underwater. Plastic Bullet is fun for that.

I'd like to make more collages now but while I have a box file full of clippings, I don't have any engravings like the ones I used here and they're fun to play with. Anyone know a good resource for copyright-free illos? Most of the sites I've looked at have truly awful search funtions and it takes ages to find anything even remotely interesting or useable.

Here's a blurry photo of mini-me.

I was tucked away at the back of the bottom shelf, away from all my friends (sniff), who were on the shelf above me.

Sarah Dickson (green t-shirt), Sarah McIntyre (stripey dress), Gary Northfield (dressed as Italian Spiderman), Alex Milway (in his yeti suit), Cliodhna Lyons (in the starry t-shirt)

One thing that interested me about seeing them all was seeing all the different techniques people used to do their faces and hair.

Some were drawn and some were stitched

some used buttons and some used applique

and some were just downright odd!

(yes, that is someone knitting their own head. And a tree in a bikini.)

More stitched selves here and here.

The monthly lates events at the Science Museum are pretty good fun. It's lovely wandering through the mathematics gallery to the sound of people singing opera, or silent discoing underneath a spacecraft, and — unlike pretty much any other museum I can think of — not only are there several tables on various floors selling booze (instead of in just one place), but they also trust that adults can be grown-up and you can take your drinks around the galleries. I don't know of any other museums that let you do that, in London, anyway. However, they also close off the main staircase, which is annoying and leads to much high jinks with the lifts, as they end up stopping erratically at different floors in random order, depending on where the button has been pressed. With only two lifts it can take the best part of ten minutes just to go up one floor, and if one of you gets in a different lift by mistake you'll probably lose each other for the rest of the night. But if you don't find each other, chances are you'll run into other people you know. It's that kind of night.

(Also, I knocked a few more points off my uberlist! Maybe I should do a proper update post. If anyone else cares.)