Pea Arts About

On 29 December 2021 as the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 settled in to its rampage across the UK, my party of three managed to visit Coventry and spend much of the day in the delightful Herbert Gallery and Museum . We tentatively booked our free tickets a couple of weeks before, unsure until the morning of 26 December that we'd even get away to the West Midlands to visit family. Testing negative on the Wednesday morning, Andrew, his mum (textile artist Jacky Shail ) and I struck out east from Malvern to the 2021 UK City of Culture and found the Herbert. The staff were welcoming, informative and helpful. We felt as secure as could be from seeing them regularly cleaning surfaces and kindly but firmly putting across a message of 'no mask, no entry' to anyone not covering their germ-holes. I'm going to mostly focus on the Turner Prize show in these notes, but it's also worth pointing out the venue's other offerings. The Herbert's museum section traces Coventry...

February on Audiovisual Cultures Podcast featured episodes delving into dual outsider/insider identities, firstly in discussing Gael García Bernal's returned-from-exile character René Saavedra in No (dir. Pablo Larraín, 2012), and secondly in my conversation with Irish-American performing artist Shea Donovan, linked here: It is an identity I have had to come to embrace in myself, albeit to a more localised extent than a Chilean exile raised in Mexico because of a military dictatorship or a recent descendant of Irish émigrés to the United States now living in London. For me, it's grappling with the outsider identity that has fallen on me after having to leave Belfast for Britain to get work - I am no longer of my home city, and not out of choice. Pre-pandemic, I enjoyed a sense of inside-ness while outside in finding a broadly Irish community here in Newcastle upon Tyne, and in Brexit Britain I embraced the defined-only-as-other-to-the-English Irish identity projected upon me be...

I keep thinking about the film Happiest Season (dir. Clea DuVall, 2020). So much of it struck me, and, apart from briefly outlining some thoughts with a friend, I haven't had much chance to talk out all the things about it that still tick over in my mind. I rented it back in December in preparation for a podcast discussion about it the next day, which the prospective guest postponed, and I never heard back. I have an open-door policy on this: folk are welcome and invited, but I will not chase them. Being someone with more authority than me on the film's most prominent subject matter, I didn't feel I had the standing to talk it through on the podcast by myself, and this person had so much to say on Twitter that I knew it would have made for a lively and informative discussion. Ach, these things happen, and I was keen to watch the film anyway because I've always liked DuVall as an actor and had a feeling she'd be a great storyteller too.  I very much enjoyed every asp...