The South Bank

I’m so behind with updating this thing! I took a course in Photo Etch with Jill McKeown at the weekend, but I’ll leave the write up of that ’til I have photos of the prints (they’re still drying under a stack o’ boards in the studio). Photo Etch = Love.

I briefly went home to London a couple of weeks ago. I haven’t been back in a few years, so it was a wee bit of a culture shock. My beloved Borough Market and South Bank are now uber-trendy capitals of culture. It’s lovely to see the development going on down there, but a tiny part of me misses the old tranquility of the river. The Borough and Waterloo were my childhood hunting grounds - nearly every weekend my dad would take us on a photo expedition from Hay’s Galleria, past the Kathleen & May, the Clink, and along the river up to Westminster. I used to skateboard under the Royal Festival Hall, and one of my first jobs was at the then-newly-opened London Aquarium. Of course, I adore the Tate Modern - I’ve always loved the Bankside Power Station, and I have a vivid memory of my dad promising me a fiver if I could count all the bricks in the building. I rummaged in my parent’s attic and dug out a load of my old A Level photography prints of the dilapidated old dock warehouses at the Borough - these are now food and drink emporiums. Still, we got some gorgeous mushrooms and unusual tomatoes. Mmm.

One of the highlights was this interactive aquatic sculpture, ‘Appearing Rooms’ by Jeppe Hein:

These were four ‘rooms’ created by high pressure water-jets - each wall rose and fell at random so, once inside, you had to shift from room to room to get out without getting soaked. Mum and I stayed in it for far too long - I want one!

I didn’t get a chance to see the Anthony Gormley exhibition at the Hayward (I remember being amazed by ‘Field’ in situ at the Hayward many years ago), but I did take a photo of one of the many full-body casts dotted around the area like attemptive suicides.

I love them.

Gabriel’s Wharf is still just the same, and I bought my first original print from the Southbank Printmaker’s Gallery: an etching by Teresa Pateman that I fell in love with. She had another piece there that was absolutely gorgeous - a glowing pot of tea and a custard cream - but my wallet was a bit bare. I must find out how she gets those gorgeous glowing colours and gradients in her prints.