AI and the Soul of Writing

Drawing 1 Eleanor MacFarlane

My ability to write this at all, such as it is, is not thanks to AI. It is the fruit of years and decades of turning up, figuring out and learning, mostly in areas of deep discomfort.

Like many people with Dyslexia, when I begin writing an article or an academic essay, all my ideas get chaotically bunched up in the opening paragraph – all the words are there, but I have had to learn to string them out into a pace that makes sense for other readers as well as myself.

 

Drawing 2 Eleanor MacFarlane

When I was a child and a teenager, Dyslexia obviously existed, but certainly not in my schools. I was a bright child who later had to learn to mask confusion – I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t just learn some things – certain vocabulary, concepts in maths and music theory. It was only much later, when I returned to university as a mature student after crashing and burning first time around, that the Dyslexia penny dropped. What a revelation for me, and all those gaps, workarounds, and areas of mixed wiring began to be possibilities. The power of an assessment and diagnosis is that you stop thinking there’s something intrinsically wrong with you. Perhaps neurodiversity is like having a left-handed brain in a right-handed world – you’re free to devise your own methods.

My Dyslexia was also quite difficult to pick up because I was a very early reader and writer – at times voraciously so. Yes, I can still get stuck on the same paragraph, and fixated by something like a misprint, classic Dyslexia experiences, but I’ve always rather enjoyed those liminal states in my mind – they’re almost like the waking dream state I like to get into when I’m writing poetry.

I pushed myself so much into these areas of discomfort – academic essays, etc, that I ended up with a degree and two masters. I had a drive to get to the other side, to get through the difficult and uncomfortable bits in order to become somewhat fluent in the subject. Sometimes it really wasn’t pretty – getting through master’s level statistics for psychology took all of my brain juice, but in other ways, I learned to like what had been so difficult. I learned to structure academic essays, and in time was able to tutor other Dyslexic students in such academic skills. Summarising, which had been an area of impossibility for me at school, has become something I have in my gift, honed from years of book and exhibition reviews.

I have therefore, at times through finding new and inventive ways peculiar to myself, and at other times through sheer bloody-minded learning, forged new neural pathways, pathways that I prize, and that somewhat define me. Some are hard won, some are instinct, some due to revelation. Who’s to say? But they are mine.

Along the way in my writing quest, technology has of course played its part. Computing and word processing save time and keep things neat. Spell check is a boon.

Writing is an effort. It’s an effort for me to think about what I want to say in this, and to trust that the words and concepts will occur to me in more or less the right order. I have certain hopes and beliefs in my internal editing methods. But above all, I have faith in my writing process, that I cast my intention forth, that I reach for the space where I sense thought and feeling collide, and that it will occur to me in a form I can access and translate into writing. Sometimes it can be difficult, frustrating and uncomfortable, and sometimes it can be fluid, joyous and profound. Like poetry.

My social media feeds seem to half-full of adverts offering me programmes to throw a few of my ideas together and become an instant expert with a best-selling book – no effort! AI will do all the difficult bits! What, without the pleasure and work, the inspiration and expansion of labouring on a book myself? We do know, don’t we, that writing is not just about words. It’s quite a mystical process when we stop to think about it, creating form from concepts, feelings, the nebulous human area, the infinite internal.

Why would I delegate that process to AI? I feel it would be like crack cocaine once tasted (not that I’ve ever indulged in that). I feel the danger of AI creep into the very prized, mysterious, human process of writing. I can only speak for myself, but my writing comes from the most human part of me – the striving, the emotional, the feeling in the dark, the Dyslexic. I access the gap where there are no words, and words appear. All else is learned.

Scribble Eleanor MacFarlane

Are we at the brink of delegating our writing, our thinking, poetry to AI? In the 1960s there were some interesting experiments in constructing poetry by mechanical means. Throw a bunch of words in the air and the human will find meaning in the landed arrangement. It’s a human characteristic to find meaning. Even newborn babies’ attention will gravitate towards two dots that look like a face. 

It's fascinating to see chess players play against computers. How marvellous that computing can become so complex, so multi-layered as to master a game of strategy, and how amazing that it could outplay a human. But would we really want to watch two chess computers play against each other, without the wonder of the humanity, and all the distractions, emotions, intellect, understanding and patterning that we can somewhat relate to? That’s it, chess solved, no point in learning. Mastery of chess is about so much more than intellect. AI can fill in your crossword puzzle, so why bother with the challenge of working things out?

Do we want to get our meaning from stitched-together words generated from AI without a human somewhere mastering, striving, feeling their way, having inspiration land at last?

And as for fiction and poetry. Would you ever want to read something written by AI, to take it into your heart? I’m sure it could write something splendid about this beautiful autumn day today, with the golden sun sparkling, making everything seem hyper-real, or would that be the sun is revealing the deeper reality revealed by autumn, of life and the beauty of change? Bung a few of those concepts into Chat GPT and I’m sure it would come up with something coherent, even lyrical. I may be slightly interested in reading that, once, as an experiment, but there’s that crack cocaine, the addictive, sugary, meaning-lite fix to which I would ascribe some meaning. The truth is, such a poem has no soul. It’s not born from the years, decades, generations of culture and evolution. It’s surface, and the opposite of profound, whatever that is.

Perhaps it is Luddite to resist change. The Luddites have had a poor reputation as laggards, backwards dunces who fought inevitable progress. Today they are more recognised as people who resisted the soulless mechanisation of labour, and the degradation of humanity as mere cogs in the wheels of progress. They weren’t completely wrong, were they, when we consider the countless thousands who were trampled in factories and mines during the Industrial Revolution. How soon after came the Arts and Crafts movement which valued the human touch in artefacts and the cultural legacy of craft, only this time as a more moneyed and privileged pursuit.

I’m sure if it is well used, AI can be a fabulous word processing tool. If you find it useful for writing applications, emails, whatever, then great for you, and I’m also grateful to you for forging the human/AI interface, hopefully somewhere positive. I’m resisting. I’m holding onto writing from my human, Dyslexic mind.

I’m reminded of Mrs Doyle from Father Ted when she’s given the hated teamaking machine which is to unburden her from the misery of being on constant tea-making duty. ‘Maybe I like the misery’ she says, stabbing the machine with a screwdriver. Perhaps I like the discomfort of writing. Perhaps I am so used to the toil and effort that I know no other way to reap the reward of crafting meaning in words. Perhaps my neural pathways like the striving, the creating. I know I do.

Mrs Doyle and the TeaMaker, Father Ted, Channel 4

Eleanor MacFarlane, not AI, October 2025

Hockney: A year in Normandie and some other thoughts about painting: Serptentine

I'm going to join the conversation assuming any reader knows something, or quite a bit, about David Hockney and the continual flowering of his art practice into old age. He's now 88, and clearly still in flow. Age is such a relevant context because we can then easily read and assume layers of experience in his works.

David Hockney 2025

Hockney has always been someone who works in plain sight. He's very knowledgeable about art history, and this shows in the apparent distortions in his works, especially the paintings. He doesn't do anything too coy or clever, but distorts perspective in a straightforward and intelligent manner. The paradox is that sometimes his perspective looks wrong to our eyes, but I was so struck in the recent portraits at the Serpentine how deliberate this was, how layered, and how it pointed to so much in the history and philosophies of art and seeing. Suddenly we see, in a straightforward way, the bizarre assumptions we make about how we see the flat surface of a painting as having more dimensions. Suddenly I am thinking of medieval ideas about object and image meeting the eye: about how we've learned that we actually see everything upside down, but that our brain learns to invert that early on. We've learned a certain interpretation of how we see.

                         

 David Hockney 2025

My own preference is for the abstract paintings featured as the subject rather than the person. Just my taste. In fact, I could take the following painting home and spend quite some time just looking at it and musing every day.

David Hockney 2025

Painting is about showing us how we see, and Hockney is still questioning our assumptions. Each era has a paradigm of knowledge that we all more or less agree upon. For example, currently we all believe in, say, gravity, but in different eras that was not always so - there were other reasons why things fell to earth, and in the future, perhaps understanding will outgrow the concept of gravity. Perspective is in continuous play in art, and has been for some centuries, both in literal and metaphorical senses. 

That's what I see when I encounter Hockney - an artist who has continually fresh perspectives on perspective itself - literally and metaphorically, and who poses these new angles with a light touch. He's not a bombarder - not an overwhelmer. His works tend to be person-sized, and not made for blockbuster exhibitions.

I was reminded that when I was doing my own MA, the painter Tomma Abts won the Turner Prize (2006). I particularly remember that my tutors were quite shocked, because Abts, by her own admission, does not do research. I don't know how informed she is, and I make no comment here about her work, but I do know that when an artist is informed and curious about history and research, and manages a light touch in their work, they open up so many more ways to look and relook at their work. Whatever you bring to the art will be there to some extent.

Tomma Abts 2006

The Serpentine has set up the Normadie paintings almost in the round of the building, and you can walk around and around, as if passing through seasons in this wonderful continuous landscape of real and yet unreal places. This rolling landscape is to be enjoyed. The booklet, which I read after seeing the exhibition, talked of Hockney being inspired both by the Bayeux Tapersty and Chinese scroll paintings. I can see that, but what I thought of when there were Medieval tapestries, with the delightful distorted perspective of a clump of flowers adjacent to a tree of almost the same size.

David Hockney 2025

I bumped into someone at the Serpentine who had seen the Normandie paintings when they had been shown a couple of years ago in Paris, in a slightly different configuration. She thought the Serpentine had done a much better job, with the dark walls and glowing paintings. It's hard to imagine it done better. An uplifting and interesting exhibition in a great building in a beautiful park, and all for free.

I guess Hockney has been somewhere on my mind a bit of late, as I recently had the opportunity of visiting Saltaire in North Yorkshire, a beautiful model town with a massive world heritage textile mill. Hockney has a long associating with the place, and his exhibition there, 20 Flowers for 2025 and Some Bigger Pictures, showed similar prolific work, to me, also talking points about perspective. And painting. Hockney is a master of ipad painting after many years of work. He was the ultimate early adopter. The paintings are like the old masters in that close up you can see all the blobs and smudges - in his case the pixels, but take some steps back and the clarity comes into focus. Again, they are person-sized works, and yet they really work very well in an enormous space.

David Hockney Flowers

From a Window in Salts Mill

Salts Mill at Saltaire

Hockney: A year in Normandie and some other thoughts about painting

Serptentine North Gallery, West Carriage Drive, Hyde Park, London W2 2AR

12th March - 23rd August 2026

Admission Free

serpentine galleries hockney normandie

V&A: Design and Disability

I came to the press view of Design and Disability, where I heard the director of V&A, Tristram Hunt, and the curator Natalie Kane talk about the exhibition, about how it was a celebration of design by and for disabled people, a call to action, about all the fun and inspiration to be had therein. All I can say is that I wish I had been at that exhibition. I'm really sorry to say that I was sadly disappointed by the V&A this time.

The best lovers are good with their hands

I always prefer to know as little as possible about an exhibition before seeing it, as I love the element of surprise and discovery, and to figure things out for myself. And so I thought I had an open mind when I attended, only to quickly realise that I did indeed have expectations. If you think about the resources of an institution like the V&A, and all the people who would happily collaborate with it, added to their practice of collecting contemporary works, then the notion of an exhibition about design and disability is rather exciting - perhaps they have collected key pieces from major artists and designers from the last few decades. Perhaps they have commissioned some cutting edge works or installations. I realised that I had imagined they'd worked with researchers as an opportunity for cross discipline collaboration. And so on.

Instead, we get more of a six form college display. Other writers there I talked to found it infantile and patronising.

Once I saw an exhibition, which shall remain nameless, where the curation had sucked the life out of all the exhibits. Okay, yes, I was part of this exhibition, not as an artist, but in this case as a researcher. I'd help to choose the marvellous pieces from various archives. There was new commissioned work of high quality. When I came along to the opening, I was astounded by how little impact all these pieces had. It was hard to figure out, but the way they were shown totally missed the point. The curator had almost an anti-talent for visual interest and had strong imposing beliefs about how objects should be encountered. I think you see what I'm getting at here.

I'm sorry for the designers who have their works displayed in such a mediocre manner. I admit that the overall impression made me disengage with most of the exhibition. Perhaps if you go you will have better luck, and see what I can't.

There's a sort of rule in reviewing, in my own mind at least, that you only write about what is actually in the exhibition. It's very much: does it do what it says on the tin. Otherwise, what is written about exhibitions, and culture, is nothing more than publicity and advertising copy. In his talk, Tristram Hunt referenced various works the V&A have shown over the years including the artist Frida Kahlo's prosthetic legs (which were complete with red boots). Something like that would have been great, it's just that there was nothing like that in the exhibition.

There's talk about how the exhibition space itself is accessible. Again, give me a break. It really pains me to be so negative, but I actually felt quite upset and angry at the cognitive dissonance at what I was being told, and my actual experience. This is not cutting edge, inclusive, inventive exhibition design. My view is that this is a team failure, curation by committee perhaps, and a sort of group think agreeing with other.

Design and Disability should have been innovative, bold, impressive, startling. It should have mattered to culture and to museum practice. It could have been a standard in design and disability for others to emulate. Instead I came away deeply disappointed at the wasted opportunity and the V&A's lack of ambition. They can do much better.

After, I wandered around the museum for a while, being soothed by the healing presence of wonderful artefacts.

Soothing objects in the V&A

V&A South Kensington, Cromwell Road, London, SW7 2RL

This is a paid for exhibition, disabled visitors can go free.

Opens 07 June 2025.

V&A Design and Disability 

V&A East Storehouse

The V&A East Storehouse is a wonderful, beautiful and quite awesome experience.

I've been fortunate enough to be inside quite a few archives where the bones of gallery and museum collections lie: the real stuff of artefacts before they get polished up and shown in a glass cabinet, accompanied by explaining text and context. I visited the old V&A archive in Blythe House which was splendid: a vast place filled with wooden cabinets, almost like a beautiful dream where you get to wonder through a treasure trove. Other archives I've visited have often been less salubrious: perhaps somewhere cramped but intriguing where the atmospheric conditions are ideal for objects but not humans.

And so I had hopes and fears as I went to V&A's new Storehouse in East London. But you walk in and there it all is, vastness again, and rows and levels of objects, artefacts, wonders and treasures, all there to be encountered without the layers of curation that museums offer and impose.

Curation is important, a vital language which helps each generation to interpret its past. Without curation and knowledge, we often lose the significance of items, our very living history in fact.

And yet how pleasurable it is to have encounters with objects, with many, many objects, totally unencumbered by those layers of curation. There are no, or few, labels and explanations drawing the eye away from the object itself. That experience simply engages the imagination, and triggers all the accumulated knowledge drawn from previous museum visits and other learning.

The artefacts are arranged seemingly randomly. Of course, they're not completely random - some are grouped and clustered, but there is a feel that everything is placed and arranged primarily by size and more practical reasoning than relationships. We're so used to artefacts being presented to us to illustrate their relationship to a time or cultural movement within museums and galleries that Storehouse seems utterly fresh.

Perhaps it's like being in a warehouse for a large auction house. There are treasures and discoveries to be made around every corner. The arrangements can and will shift over time as the objects are needed, for this is a working archive. We can watch the conservation studios through glass ceilings. We are aware of even more rows of stored works which are not yet available. It keeps opening up.

I can't even describe what I saw there - what do you see in museums? No spoilers - discover for yourself! V&A have raised the game and rewritten what an archive can be. All of these artefacts belong to the public, and now we can access them. We are personally culturally the richer. This won't replace museums, but will enhance museums visits with the focus on the object and not the curation in mind.

I recently went along to the Museum and Heritage show - a trade show for the sector. That's a whole other story which I may well tell. I would say the trend there was towards digital displays and the creep of AI. In that ethical minefield, the V&A have reframed the museum experience. State of the art is for the technology which has allowed this warehouse encounter, and I thank whatever deity that they did not invest in something like holographic experience of objects. Come along and feel the presence of objects and smell the aroma of history which hangs in the air.

Opening 31 May 2025. Free.

V&A East Storehouse Parkes Street, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Hackney Wick, London E20 3AX

Find out more and all the impressive stats:

vam.ac.uk/east 

Hackney Wick and the Olympic Park area is a great area to explore and have a mooch about.

Francis Bacon: Human Presence: National Portrait Gallery

Some people seem born to paint.

In the 20th century, painting was such a powerful crucible for psychological processing. What parts of the psyche can be expressed through imagery while the whole world is at war.

Bacon's trajectory in painting was to go deeper into his own language. He didn't really deviate and experiment with different styles once he had found his voice. He just developed and went further.

I remember seeing the screaming Pope paintings many years ago, and the impact they had. The imagery has been deeply influential in culture - think horror movies and album covers. They are still terrible and unsettling, but I've never quite seem them in the way described in exhibition text. Rather than scaling back and revealing the trappings of powerful men, I feel full of pity for the figures, and how we are all caught in our own fragmentary, illusionary identity. Truly successful paintings manage to maintain ambiguous balance, always open to reinterpretation.

Frances Bacon, Head VI, 1949

Bacon was deeply knowledgeable about and influenced by art history. In the exhibition this relationship is clear, especially his obsessions with Velasquez's Pope and Van Gogh.

I was reminded very much of the paintings of Walter Sickert, and the revealing of the inner person, the shadow self, distorted by the maelstrom of feelings and urges.

                    Frances Bacon, Self Portrait 1973                            Walter Sickert, Self Portrait, 1896

                                                       Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Fruit Basket, 16th century

There is also a feeling in Bacon's portraits of the Cortical Homunculus, a sensory representation of what it feels like, rather than looks like to be human. We don't normally see the distortions Bacon paints, but we feel them. He almost sees and paints ectoplasm.

             Frances Bacon, Head of a Boy, 1960

The exhibition includes Francis Bacon on film and in photography. He stated that he hated his own face, but it is so expressive and revealing. Perhaps that is why.

J.S Lewinski, Francis Bacon, 1967

Once again the NPG have delivered a generous and meticulous exhibition. It's the nearest you'll get to walking through another person's psyche.

The portraits don't need the parallels I have shown, but that's how I saw it all, what I brought. These paintings will never lose their power, nor their place in art history.

                                

Francis Bacon, Portrait of a Man                   Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No2, 1912

Walking down Steps, 1972  

National Portrait Gallery, London

10 October 2024 to 19 January 2025

National Portrait Gallery Francis Bacon

Six Lives: The Stories of Henry VIII's Queens: National Portrait Gallery

I had high hopes for this exhibition, after all, we just can't get enough of the Tudors, can we? It's an intriguing thought, all those characters that still keep showing up in our culture, congregated together once again after a few centuries. So much of our system of government, law and religion still reverberate from the time of Henry VIII and the fate of his six wives. Books, TV programmes and films barely take a break from reimagining and reinterpreting different aspects of the main players, heroes, villains and victims.

As a reviewer, I feel my role is to reflect the scope and scale of an exhibition, the experience of being there, and whether if fulfils it's own brief. Personally, I always like to go to an exhibition knowing as little about it as possible, except that I have a reason or expectation about it. A review is not the exhibition essay or report, and so I will just give a few glimpses for any visitor to enjoy making their own discoveries without spoilers. And, especially in this case, to raise expectations.

I'd like to mention the absolutely exquisite production values on show. The walls are deep jewel colours, the lighting uses shadow and glowing drama, the wall script is informative but concise, and the mounting is perfection.

Perhaps we think we know the stories of the six women, still debated long after they either were divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded or survived. This exhibition collects a wealth of treasures demonstrating that the myths, herstories and legends they inspired have been swirling around since their own time, and that in their after life, as in life, they were portrayed as political pawns, cautionary tales or archetypes.

I truly love an exhibition with paintings and artefacts together. We are so near to the items these people  knew and touched. There is the painter, the subject, and then yourself, the viewer, with only a glass frame in between. Not even time can separate that immediacy, even if the time is a few centuries. There is such a sense of presence in this exhibition. Many of the images are quite familiar, but this is the first time such a major exhibition about the six wives of Henry VIII has been produced, and the first time these paintings and artefacts have been drawn together. Mammoth bibles, personal books, jewellery, costume, letters, a 1920's film, photography and more, allow the portraits to come to life even more and to really live in the imagination.

I got chatting to a couple of lovely mud larking ladies (hello!) who have found similar items to some  depicted, such as Tudor buttons, on the banks of the Thames. With the river just a few streets away from the NPG, I looked over at another marvellous Holbein painting and was suddenly struck with the thought that all these mighty characters who knew each other in life, who fought to survive, and politicked and manoeuvred, had been gathered in spirit once again in London. What happens at night when the lights go out?

This is a paid exhibition, with a programme of events. There are also some times when you can pay what you want - look online.

National Portrait Gallery, London

20 June to 8 September 2024 

national portrait gallery six lives

Judy Chicago: Revelations: Serpentine Gallery

Judy Chicago is an icon of feminist, contemporary and recent art. Her works, especially The Dinner Party of 1974-1979 places her practice firmly in the herstory of art and the rewriting of culture to include the women who had been there all along.

The Serpentine are calling Revelations an exhibition and not an actual retrospective, but it is a retrospective really, with works covering all six decades of her career, and her largest solo London show. However, it's astounding that there is not more about The Dinner Party, the work which launched Chicago's international reputation and place in the development and elevation of feminist art. I was lucky to attend the press view, and had a couple of chats with others there. We all discussed The Dinner Party, and I'm not sure it's really possible to appreciate Chicago without it.

Judy Chicago Revelations

It seems against all my reviewing principles to write about a work that's not in the actual exhibition, but in brief, The Dinner Party made a splash in the art world in the late 70's and 80's. I saw it myself many years ago when it was on show in London, and it made an enormous impression on me. I remember it made quite a splash in the media at the time, in the sense of the 'is this really art' debate. If you want to know more...www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/dinner_party/ (Perhaps there are copyright issues involved in recreating even one setting of this culturally significant piece.)

That work, and Chicago's whole output, had influence outside the world of art, bringing into public consciousness forgotten women that she celebrated. It's not just about art, it's about culture and society. Now in her eighties, Chicago still speaks with fire and emotion about rebalancing the world away from toxic patriarchy. This is always highly politicised issue-based artwork, but never at the expense of beauty and technique. Women's' pain and the deep wounds of inequality are the subjects, from the woman's point of view.

Chicago has a particular aesthetic in drawings and prints. I do admire an artist who is fundamentally still regularly in the studio, just them and the paper.

Judy Chicago Revelations

I didn't know anything about her pyrotechnic and smoke works, represented in videos and stills. They are gorgeous and astounding, and for me, the best kind of works which can be viewed and interpreted in multiple ways. Chicago was a trailblazer, continuing to produce powerful art in the face of discrimination. She was an outsider in terms of artworld acceptance, who carried on regardless, and has forged a trail. It turns out it is great to meet your heroes.

Judy Chicago

Judy Chicago Revelations

Serpentine North, Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA

23rd May - 1st September 2024

Admission free

Yinka Shonibare: Suspended States: Serpentine Gallery

Yinka Shonibare is an artist whose work is usually immediately recognisable, with his career-long use of Dutch wax print fabrics and their interplay with colonial imagery. It still shocks, and also delights, to see a Winston Churchill or Queen Victoria statue decorated with the bright yellows and blues, pinks and reds of African costume, the floral and paisley prints taking over the very substance of the person. Usually oversized and imposing, these figures seem cut down to size.

 Decolonised Structures Yinka Shonibare

It's as if from now on, every such statue that you see of a person in power, each symbol of authority and subjugation has such fabric and design projected upon it. Shonibare has done that to the imagination. Such figures, the evidence of wealth, just cannot be seen any more without the awareness of the colonised nations who paid such a heavy price for empire. We can no longer go through our cities and the grandest central buildings, the areas of commerce, without an awareness of the legacy of plantations and slavery which funded them. The history has always been there, and is now uncovered and exposed.

Shonibare is a creator, not a destructor. He subverts through beauty, the most powerful of arts. He adds.

The work is deeply researched and based upon knowledge and the retelling of history. The retruthing of history. And yet he maintains the lightest of touches. What he does is in plain sight, and yet his work can be approached, and is approached, in many ways. It is the colours of the Dutch wax prints, it is the history of that batique fabric in Africa, along with all its glorious aesthetic values.

The dark central room of the Serpentine houses a collection of  dark architecture model-like buildings, glowing from within with the illumination of his signature fabrics. It's a stunningly beautiful piece, and like a dream come true to wander in there. Again, the cathedrals and buildings of the West are shown with African culture long embedded within the walls and windows.

Sanctuary City Yinka Shonibare

Not just a shelf of books, but walls, an entire library, It's such a generous presence, gorgeous to the eye. You know there is more order there, underlying meanings, and after a while, you realise that the books are marked for wars and conflicts, and some unnamed for those yet to be. Like all intriguing libraries that can only be looked at and not touched, the mind fills in with possibilities and imagining what treasures may be hidden within the volumes.

 The War Library and Yinka Shonibare

This entire show is meticulous and a pleasure to be in. I found it deeply moving and inspiring. There is nothing heavy handed about the message, and that is what gives Yinka Shonibare his power.

Serpentine South, Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA

12th April - 1st September 2024

Admission free.

www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/yinka-shonibare-cbe-suspended-states/

Portraits to Dream In: National Portrait Gallery

Imagine being one of the very earliest photographers, exploring the meanings and possibilities of a new world. In the mid nineteenth century, and for a considerable time after, photography was very hands on, as much a darkroom science as art. This really was the reality for photography until fairly recent digital technology, that each plate was as much a consideration of time as light and composition. Now we can take twenty quick snaps on our phone, and choose the best, but then, each image was infinitely more considered. Every photograph required so much processing and further investment of effort, that quality far outweighed the idea of quantity.

Imagine being one of the first people to realise the painterly qualities of photography, and how it can capture aspects of character and personality unique to the medium.

We are used to seeing some weird Victorian photographs, the propped up dead family members in a studio setting, the glum, serious, buttoned up portraits. We appreciate that exposure took so long that people had to keep still, much longer than anyone could say cheese. In Cameron's work we know the subjects have been arranged and are sitting for a long time, really settled into the pose. There is a ghostliness about the slight blurring, an awareness of the soul, and what the photograph can only allude to but never capture.

I seem to remember writing my fine art degree dissertation about light hitting the camera, and how that is the same light that the photographer saw, that bounced off the subject. While a painting is the same paint, and a sculpture is the same stone that the artist touched, there is something about the same light, and sharing the same moment in time that is thrilling for me.

It's a rare and privileged treat to see so many of the actual prints in this exhibition. It's been a triumph of organisation and logistics to arrange international loans. Some of these images I knew quite well, and probably had on a postcard on my teenage bedroom wall. I love that feeling of being a bit star struck to meet an artwork in the flesh, to see its marks and substance, rather than just its image. These works are so rarely seen that they are too delicate to photograph directly, or to have flash. The relationship with light continues.

As a completely freelance and in fact unfettered reviewer, I can focus on whatever I like. I never feel it's my role to reflect an entire exhibition, but to give my impression. In some ways this show is curated with a delightfully light hand - the mounting and framing is meticulous, the colour of the walls are somehow unnamable and glowing, the lighting is sympathetic. The script on the walls is absolutely right, quite spare - how often has your eye been drawn away from the work, especially in photography exhibitions, to read the text? Here the work speaks for itself, and is arranged thematically.

However, I found the curation of this exhibition extremely insistent, if not heavy handed. I admit that I just didn't have the bandwidth to look at the Francesca Woodman photographs, and ended up skipping them entirely in favour of the Camerons. This was not a slight on a wonderful artist, but I felt the comparison and juxtaposition, a perfectly valid and reasonable curator's choice, just did not work for me. Perhaps it's like programming music - I can easily listen to a concert of Sibelius and Stravinsky, but I just can't listen to them at the same time.

I came to see the Julia Margaret Cameron photographs. I wanted to dive into that aesthetic. Yes, these two artists have so many qualities and parallels, in their allegorical approach to photography, and in aesthetic, but I would have had a preference for more separation in sections. In an exhibition I want to make my own discoveries, and not constantly be told how to see things. I love a bit of judicious juxtaposition. Portraits to Dream In constantly interrupts itself by shuffling the two artists together.

I was reminded of an exhibition I once went to in Prague, where the attendants were extremely annoyed that I wandered about rather than follow the prescribed sequence.

I almost want to return, this time just to look at the gorgeous Francesca Woodman works, the poignant flowering of a short life.

The National Portrait Gallery has had another revamp. It really is exquisite and well worth a visit. A Pay as You Wish scheme opens this exhibition up to all.

Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In 

National Portrait Gallery,  London 

21March - 16June 2024

www.npg.org.uk2 francesca-woodman-and-julia-margaret-cameron-portraits-to-dream-in

Addition 21 March 2024

I woke up this morning in a new realisation about the curation question. I know enough about dyslexia to recognise its effect, even if that is delayed. A typical initial response is an inner feeling that there is somehow something wrong or missing with the self, because I can't access perfectly accessible information. I mean, what's wrong with me!

Dyslexia is about processing information in the mind. It's individual, but there are shared characteristics. The dyslexic mind is creative because it MUST invent for itself patterns and connections. What can be found in that way can be astonishing, but the dyslexic mind also finds it extremely difficult to follow prescribed patterns of thought. I recognise this. I know it.

It is typical of dyslexia to find it frustratingly distracting to be faced with conflicting and simultaneous information. The eye scatters - a simple example is that dyslexic people find columns of print difficult to read because their eyes are particularly distracted by the overwhelm of information in the other columns. This is the way Portraits to Dream In is presented. Perhaps it is a very smooth experience for neuro-typical and neuro-linear people to access. For dyslexic and neuro-diverse people I truly bet that I will not be alone.

This exhibition would be an ideal setting for a proper psychological study if it could quickly be devised and arranged. I have written about this area before, in the aftermath of my own psychology masters and study, and my experience of assessing exhibitions for Arts Council England. If it could be done, I'd love to do it.