From Clapton to the Mandrake Hotel and on to Frieze, the art vortex reverberates across London
What happens is, a couple of giant tents (bigger than you are imagining) get crammed full of art, gallerists and artists, and the result is so dense that it magnetises other parts of the art world towards it, some unwillingly, some excitedly, some with money to spend, some without. This is how I explained it to an unknowing friend. ‘So, it’s like an art festival’ they asked. No… it’s more like flocks of tropical birds all swarming, gossiping and posing around multitudes of art. This yearly art vortex triggers satellite art-clusters that reverberate all over the city. ‘Is it fun’ they asked. It’s a mixed bag.
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Emma Talbot, works from Pictures from my Heart: Slight Return, 2010
Findings Gallery |
When I start out, I am already lagging behind, as it’s Wednesday evening and I’m only at the edge of the Frieze-hype-galaxy, in the glow of the stellar halo in East London. A small gallery called Findings has seemingly created a slight wormhole through time by exhibiting a very particular set of drawings by Emma Talbot. These works were made by the artist 15 years ago as an almost-identical-twin of another set of her drawings titled Pictures from my Heart, that were exhibited nearby at Transition Gallery back in 2010. They now return in a beautiful echo 15 years later at Findings Gallery, and this ‘slight return’ is referred to in the exhibition title. Both sets of drawings were made during in a time of bereavement for the artist and mark an important turning point in her practice.
What strikes me when looking at these drawings is Talbot’s startlingly playful translation of the everyday into heightened moments of atmospheric intensity. They feature a feminine protagonist inhabiting various domestic scenarios, with windows, hair, beds, intimacy and low lighting building a diary-like dreamscape. Described in a weirdly cartoonish and almost doll-like way, the figures are absurd with giant faceless heads, yet convincing and somehow retaining familiarity. Talbot’s extraordinary lines curl and flow from work to work, weaving distinctive handwritten text and abstract lines into the scenes. It reminds me of the way music can stitch together a fragmented narrative. The blank space between the lines become as important as pauses in sound. I get the sense that these works were borne through that golden kind of reckless-but-focused process that I am always striving to find and hold on to as an artist. As I leave, the narrow gallery space is glowing like a boat at sea with oyster shells containing lit candles clustered around the entrance.
Two days later I’ve been drawn a little closer to the supermassive blackhole of Frieze by an invite to the Mandrake hotel in Fitzrovia. It’s dusk again and a large and fashionable doorman ushers me in towards a low-lit cocktail bar with a high ceiling. A hefty chandelier dangles above me like a bundle of stalactites, and I concentrate hard on the instructions given to me on how to navigate this labyrinth. However, I am soon lost in the many corridors and hotel rooms that host Minor Attractions Art Fair, where 70 international galleries exhibit work alongside a curated mix of live music, performance and film. Wondering from room to room along dark corridors lit by teardrop shaped lamps is enchanting, lulling me into a slow-moving state. But I must remain nimble because each of the hotel rooms claimed by art is small, with furniture and art coexisting in a tight and sometimes precarious balance. My favourite feature is the works installed in bathrooms: hanging in the shower, on the sinks next to the hand soap and clinging to the wall tiles.
Kristina Õllek, Evaporating Sea no.2, Kogo Gallery
There are so many gems I could mention but I’ll just describe one: Kogo Gallery’s room where Kristina Õllek’s works glisten, perhaps still growing, like microbially rich fragments of frosted ice. Õllek grew up in the coastal subdistrict of Merivälja, Estonia, and describes vivid memories of waiting at bus stops while staring out at the sea, getting visually lost in its vastness. Her practice investigates life forces, aquatic ecosystems, geological matter and human-altered environments via hydrofeminist and more-than-human perspectives. She describes her process of cultivating sea salt onto inkjet prints as a very slow collaboration that involves ‘being open to the uncontrollable.’
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Rose Wylie, Lotte, 2025, oil on canvas
David Zwirner |
The next morning, I am inevitably drawn in by the gravitational pull of Frieze art fair itself, its bright fridge-like energy enveloped within the green and yellowing autumnal Regent’s Park. As expected, with the political, moral and financial instability at large, lots of the galleries have opted for safe sellable options, but many have kept their integrity, and I find a scattering of juicy morsels to quench my art stomach. Highlights include: a splodgy pair of almost-figures, reclining on a peach couch, in a vast yet claustrophobic crimson living-room (Walter Price at Xavier Hufkens), a filing cabinet drawer with a powder-coated steel flower that has be gone at with a sander (Magali Reus at The Approach), a glazed ceramic mini-fridge door overlaid with low resolution photographic prints of a white towel folded like a fan and an empty washing line at night behind a barbed-wire-topped wall (Monika Grabuschnigg at Carbon 12), some giant vivid pastel drawings of Benny the Beluga having a great time (Luís Lázaro Matos at Madragoa), a huddle of much-photographed brittle working men tying themselves in knots (Alex Margo Arden at Ginny on Frederick), a grinning spider receding hilariously on a delicate sand coloured sheet (Anne Low at Franz Kaka), a pink tinted snow scene with a distressed figure sliding into invisibility in front of a slick modernist bungalow (Jonathan Wateridge at Grimm Gallery) and a delicious grubby-mint-green football field containing a dainty but deadly Lotte Wubben-Moy and the best version of the Arsenal cannon I’ve ever seen (Rose Wylie at David Zwirner).
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Candace Hill-Montgomery, In Thee's Future Spaces, 2022, Baule African loom heddle 19th century, vintage glass feather beads, acrylic paint, linen, silk, sheep wool threads Hollybush Gardens
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My favourite though, is a small textile piece called In Thee’s Future Spaces by Candace Hill-Montgomery at Hollybush Gardens. Hill-Montgomery learnt needlework and knitting from her grandmothers and taught herself to weave from a book in 2013, wanting to find a way to make work from her bed when her studio was too cold. Politics, family history and spontaneity all play important parts in her process. The description on the gallery website uses the phrase ‘experimental defiance’ which feels fitting. This piece is predominantly monochrome except for a delicate thread of blue and includes a 19th century Baule African loom heddle. The rhythm of the weaving begins neatly in the bottom left half of the work, gradually meandering into a more warped and playful form, and then crossing a diagonal line of no return and letting loose into a slack unruly criss-crossing in the upper right section. Whisps of black fibre swim though the white-ish threads and softly delineate the triangle of the upper right half. There is a tension between chaotic fragmentation and delicate wholeness that produces a subtle and elegant balance.
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Candace Hill-Montgomery, Transactional Relationship in Terms of Support, 1968–2020, oil, stainless steel chain, mixed threads (linen, silk, lambs’ wool, merino, cashmere) Hollybush Gardens |
My favourite thing about this work, and other weaving works by Hill-Montgomery, is the way they embrace mistakes. She says she never takes anything out once it has happened during the weaving process, so any chance irregularity becomes a compass and a spark of curiosity to shape the way forward. The various objects and materials in these works feel like they have been found and gathered in spontaneous bursts, and it’s as if she could effortlessly absorb almost any material, object, image or topic into them. The things that she chooses to include gain a particular charisma due to the way she incorporates and places them in proximity to the other parts. Each weaving work is like a layered story that carries and elevates these gathered elements, giving them new power. This quality makes me think of one my favourite essays, the Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, in which Ursula K Le Guin describes a novel as ‘a medicine bundle holding things in a particular powerful relationship to one another’.
Taking a last looking at this favourite work before I exit the fair, I am reminded of beauty found in irregular spider’s webs, where the spider has strayed from the prescribed formula, perhaps reworking an area of the web after it has been broken. It occurs to me that both astrologers and religious thinkers have compared the universe to a spider’s web.
It is time to fight gravity and claw my way out of this super-dense-art-crush before it starts to evaporate. This is alien17, setting a course for home, the studio, alpha quadrant, star date 2025.
Jennifer Caroline Campbell
Emma Talbot, Pictures from my Heart: Slight Return,
Findings Gallery, 85 Clifden Road, London E5, 15 - 24 October 2025
Minor Attractions, Mandrake Hotel, Newman Street, London W1, 14-18 October 2025
Frieze, The Regent's Park, London NW1, 15-19 October 2025
