Before I met up with Ray at Harrow-on-the-Hill Station we had a visit from a plumber who knew exactly what to do to fix the problem with our boiler not starting according to the Nest timings. It took him only about 40 minutes to fix everything. He impressed me.
Met up with Ray
I discovered that Ray doesn’t like to drink out of disposable cups after he refused to enter Pret a Manger for a coffee. We had to walk on and have our coffees at somewhere different.
Tate Modern
Neither of us had any idea of what we would find at Tate Modern. We picked on their largest show which happened to be about the Australian Aboriginal artist Emily Kam Kngwarry. Neither of us had heard about her and so we entered with open minds. Born in the hinterland of the Northern Territories in 1914 she didn’t encounter white people until she had entered her teens.
Her work represents the countryside of her birth and the traditions of the aboriginal group to which she belonged. I found her paintings and artwork original and interesting but I can’t say that I understood the relationship with her homeland or with th traditions to which she belonged. She came to international prominence in her later years and died in 1996.
when we had finished touring the exhibition we crossed the Millennium Bridge to The International Headquarters of the Salvation Army where we had our lunch. Ray kindly bought my lunch. I can’t understand why the place isn’t busier. They sell pretty good food at exceedingly cheap prices for the city.
The Spell or The Dream
We headed onto to Somerset House by bus and in the middle of the courtyard an enormous statue of Sleeping Beauty lay in a steel and glass coffin. The figure produced by Tai Shani must be 15 ft long with the title ‘The Spell or The Dream’ . We both climbed up to have a closer look and found that the statue moved as if breathing. Here we met a young girl, obviously employed by Somerset House, who quizzed us on what we thought of the installation.
I had some positive things to say about how arresting the size of the work made it and that it was vaguely attractive with the colouring of the face and hair. Ray had more critical things to say, about how the casement made it feel rather sterile. I think some of Ray’s objections stemmed from the fact that she won the Turner Prize in 2019.
Virtual Beauty
Our guide to Sleeping Beauty then suggested we visited the free exhibition entitled “Virtual Beauty”. The exhibition’s description read as A thought-provoking exhibition exploring the impact of digital culture and technologies on the traditional definitions of beauty today.
It didn’t take us long to scoot around this exhibition which seemed to be dominated by the works created with the help of AI with faces transforming and morphing from one image to another.
One example I captured showed a mirror that added some decoration to your head.
We left and had a drink in the Somerset House cafe before we made our way quietly back to our own little bunkers in the suburbs.