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...

On 17 June I had the great pleasure of returning to an art gallery for the first time since early March 2020. With lockdown restrictions easing, spaces have been able to open up again with measures in place aiming to keep visitors safe while they encounter the work. As exciting as it was for me to get back out - I've been voluntarily isolating as much as possible since 12 March last year - the Delta variant is rampaging through England, and in that week in Newcastle alone known cases had risen by nearly 800 from the week before. So it was not without a degree of angst and caution that I entered the Hatton Gallery for the Newcastle University Fine Art Degree Show . While it was great to be in the presence of art objects placed in space again, and as much as I enjoyed the nostalgia the degree show always gives me for the heady opening nights at the Belfast School of Art equivalent, the hyper-awareness of other people and everyone's aerosol entering the space - because masks only ...