People often ask me “how do you know what’s going on?” The short answer is: I don’t. The longer answer is: I know who knows what’s going on. So, here’s who I turn to when I’m looking for exhibitions to cover. First, there are the apps: ArtRabbit and See Saw both feature extensive listings and both have maps and calendars to help plan your visits. There are also curated weekly newsletters: Seb’s Art List, Hector Campbell’s Shock of the Now and spittle highlight the best openings, launches and talks across the city. Finally, there are the gallery newsletters. I won’t lie, it’s a little overwhelming having several hundred emails arrive every week, but the Plaster team helps me sort out the good, the bad and the ugly. If you’re still lost, then take a chance: pick a random date in your diary and throw a dart at a map of London, there’s a good chance there’ll be a show on. But if you want me to see your show, and hold little faith in fortune, it’s probably better to email me.
In 1983, Nick Waplington started photographing his grandparents’ friends and neighbours on the Broxtowe council estate in Nottingham. His camerawork is close and involved. The low point of view places you almost at carpet level. The action is often pushed to the edges of the frame. It’s like you’re in the room with them – you’re just part of the family. Waplington shot infrequently, he wanted to preserve a sense of spontaneity. His pictures provide vignettes over months of their lives: time passes from Christmas to summer, friends and relations come and go, adults smoke and chat while kids tease and play behind their backs. You can hear the noise of hoovers, washing machines and kids fighting over the attention of the camera. There are quieter moments too: one of the dads reclines by the garden pond while the kids splash and play in an improvised paddling pool. Waplington originally published these photographs in a book, but I think the decision to show them prints was the right one. In this large format, you can appreciate the colour and complexity of both Waplington’s images and his subjects’ lives – something often lacking in other photographers’ work of the time.
Renata de Bonis shares an unsettling vision of home in her new still lifes and landscapes. There’s nothing openly strange about her subjects: flowers in vases and bottles, piles of books on bedside tables and views of buildings and skies from her windows. The strangeness comes when you notice how she’s handled her subjects and what she’s avoided painting. Time and life are suspended: the flowers are dying, the books pile on top of one another, the landscapes are all under a full moon – either it’s one long sleepless night or she’s been here for months, not leaving and barely living. Her thin washes of paint and narrow, desaturated palette drain the life and solidity from her subjects. Surfaces and objects don’t match up precisely. One side of a book stand disappears so that its marble surface appears to float. She might be suffering from tunnel vision. That would explain the close-cropped pictures. Taken together, I was reminded of how life felt four years ago in the early days of the pandemic, when home life wasn’t comforting, but full of frustration and fear.
HelenA Pritchard’s collages, maquettes and wall-mounted sculptures are all about layering and balance: of materials, sculptural elements, proportions and colour. They draw on modernist abstractions (Ben Nicholson, Piet Mondrian, Anthony Caro), however they lack the stability of those works. Pritchard’s wood panels – coated with wax, strung with netting and decorated with half-empty medicine bottles – could all come crashing down. But these works are just the support acts for the headliners: Pritchard’s three monumental Block Head sculptures. These were first shown at City Racing, a gallery owned by Pritchard in a former Methodist church in Bishop’s Castle, Shropshire, where they were easily accommodated under the high roof. At TJ Boulting, they’re squeezed into the basement gallery and reach almost to the ceiling. In the countryside, they might have been mistaken for ancient monuments, but in the middle of the city they look like they’ve been recovered from a construction site. There’s a simple trick behind how she made these works, but even knowing that doesn’t diminish their effect.
