Another week, another Five Art Things thing, We are in the body of September now, surely it is all going to pick up a little? The Art Car Boot Fair is next week, Frieze is in the Diary. Shall we go on and never mind the bliss or the selfies in front of the art or whatever we said last time. Normal service miles away from being resumed, am I falling out of love with art? Five art things, five more art things happening somewhere around right now (or any moment now). Five art shows to check out in the coming days as we repeat ourselves. We do aim to make this an (almost) weekly round up of recommended art events, five shows, exhibitions or things we rather think might be worth checking out. Mostly London things for that is where we currently operate and explore, and like we said last time, these five recommendations come with no claims that they are “the best five” or the “Top Five”, we’re not one of those annoying art websites that ignore most things whilst claiming to be covering everything and proclaiming this or that to be the “top seven things” or the “best things this weekend”. This Five Things thing is simply a regular list of five or so recommended art things happening now or coming up very soon that we think you might find as interesting as we think we will…
And we should add, that entry to these recommended exhibitions and events, unless otherwise stated, is free…
1: Wilma Johnson, Ghosts of the Madrugada at Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution – on now and until 25th Sept 2025 – “Wilma Johnson creates vivid dreamscapes in which real people cross paths with goddesses, gorgons and mythological creatures”
Wilma Johnson is always interesting, an artist and writer born in London in 1960. The last we saw of her was on a surf board, or was she doing more with those Neo Naturists? She studied painting at St Martin’s College of Art, where she also set up the highly respected Neo Naturist performance art group with Christine and Jennifer Binnie. During the 80s she performed with the Neo Naturists in venues as diverse as the Spanish Anarchist Centre, Heaven and the Royal Opera House, and also exhibited paintings inpired by hitch hiking round Iceland Lappland and the Scottish highlands.
She had a change of direction in 1987 when she went to Mexico on holiday, but stayed for a year, following the fiesta and painting in rundown hotel rooms. in 1991 she moved to Ballydavid, a fishing village on the Dingle peninsula in Ireland, where she brought up her three children and immersed herself in the role of earth mother for ten years. Then she had a revelation that she wanted to become a surfer herself. The family moved to Biarritz where she split up with her husband, swapped a painting for a surfboard and set up the Mamas Surf Club for women who felt they had spent too long watching the action from the beach, with the motto Out of the Kitchen and Into the Surf. Her travel memoir Surf Mama was published by Summersdale in 2014
‘If a tsunami did come in and my life flashed before my eyes, the great sporting moments would be few and far between. They might take up a split second or two in the highlights of my life, but no more. There would be studios and dripping paint, there’d be galleries, nightclubs and drinking clubs, love affairs and broken crockery. You might see me hitch-hiking round Iceland or Lapland in a long fur coat or strolling through Venice or Pompeii in a turban and platform shoes. You might see me wearing body paint or dancing salsa in a Mexican cantina. There’d be snatches of jungle and desert, pyramids and lava fields. Then there would be babies, green fields and windswept Irish beaches. But there wouldn’t be much sport. I’m about as far as one could be from a classic surf chick.’
“The Madrugada – the time between midnight and dawn when barriers between the worlds are fragile and dreams and reality mingle. Wilma Johnson creates vivid dreamscapes in which real people cross paths with goddesses, gorgons and mythological creatures. Many are set in her childhood home in Highgate which was destroyed by fire – the spirit of the house has presence of its own..”
Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution is at 11 South Grove, London, N6 6BS. Open Wednesday to Sunday, 1pm until 5pm week days, 10am until 4pm at the weekend. The exhibition is on now and until 25th Sept 2025. wilmajohnson.net
Previously on these pages… ORGAN THING: Celebrating the subversive with the Neo Naturists…
2: Bex Massey, The Ágalma at Seventeen – On now and until 25th Oct 2025 – Took a walk over to this one over the weekend (the gallery isn’t that far away from the Organ bunker here in East London), it was well worth the time spent doing so. Bex isn’t a big fan of what we do around here, do like her work though, do like what she has to say, always enjoyed showing her work in Cultivate shows (she did take part in a number of or shows during those messy Vyner Street days), she probably doesn’t want my opinions on the show that just opened so I’ll just say if you get a chance do go have a look, it is one of our five recommended shows this week…
“Bex Massey’s paintings carry a soft realism, images rendered in oil paint are displayed in relational pairs, usually two per canvas. A selected image appears beside its counterpart, the combination forms the start of a visual equation waiting to be balanced by you, the viewer.
Over the eleven works that comprise this new body, certain consistent factors are quickly discernible. Sweet foodstuffs reoccur, familiar but not contemporary, these are the desserts we gorged on as children. Pineapple rings are cropped suggestively and a donut has a bite missing, revealing its red, jam-filled interior. The desserts are also presented in detail, as close up layers of sensuous, oozing trifle, folds of cream and fruits, berries and seeds. Parallels in the structure of each image create connections between the paired objects, the peaks of a cupcake’s icing subtly match the layered petals in the accompanying image of a rose below it, forming a visual echo.
Viewers familiar with Massey’s territory know that their images acknowledge female bodies with playful sexual charge. The works have a clean, cold tone though, that we don’t tend to associate with these sorts of connotations. Massey is using the visual innuendo of bawdy seaside humour, innuendo that doesn’t refer just to the pleasure of sex but instead to its genetic imperative, the mechanics of reproduction. Party balloons resemble cellular clusters; a floating bubble implies an ovum or petri dish; a scoop of mint chocolate chip ice cream suggests something embryonic.
Each painting is named after a Greek god and imagery in the works also contains allusions to these figures. Massey gives each work a doubled visual symbolism, implying bodies and gods in the same concise, cropped image. The choice of deities such as Phanes, Artemis, Demeter and Priapus relates to their roles in antiquity, respectively the gods of creation; protection of women and children; motherhood and sexual potency. The show title itself, Ágalma, is an ancient Greek word with a broad meaning encompassing ornament, gift, image and statue within the context of ritual offering. Beyond its literal meanings, ágalma also carries symbolic and cultural significance, relating to concepts of beauty and honour. The show speaks of these rituals and offerings, each painting is a votive in the hope of divine favour and procreation. The sacrificial foodstuffs and idols are underscored by Massey’s accompanying sound work and the diffusion of teenage antiperspirant, hanging in the air like incense. This exhibition acts as a literal ágalma then, a heartfelt prayer from the artist to the Gods”.
Seventeen is at 270-276 Kingsland Road (Entrance on Acton Mews to rear of the building), London, E8 4DG. The gallery is open Wednesday until Saturday, 11am until 6pm
3: The Rock & Roll Public Library is over in East London this week at The Art Pavilion, Mile End, 11th until 18th September – The Rock & Roll Public Library (RRPL) is a large, material archive of 20th century pop culture, collected over a lifetime by British musician and songwriter Mick Jones. An archive encompassing many varied items, including books, comics, magazines, musical equipment, literature, art, clothing, ephemera, as well as music and film in every format, revealing a wide network of influences. A cultural history told by context, connection, and juxtaposition. It is an extensive collection which is ever-growing and always evolving.
Mick Jones, he of The Clash and such, someone said there was an early copy or two of Organ in there. He was known to quiety buy a copy back in our handmade zine days when our paths crossed in West London (which they did quite a few times). if you don’t know what the library is then you’re probably best starting with a look at the website. It is kind of like the clutter a lot of us gather together (I speak as someone who has never throw naway a demo, a zine, a flyer or a copy of Sounds, there’s boxes of if it in here, we could give Mr. Jones a good run)
Public exhibitions of the RRPL include Farsight Gallery, London, 2025; an intervention by artist Laureana Toledo at Museo Jumex, Mexico City, 2019; Instituto Santa Maria Della Pieta, Venice during the 56th Biennale de Venezia, 2015; Subway Gallery, London, 2012; Norwich University of the Arts, 2010; Peter Blake’s CCA Art Bus, 2010; twice at Chelsea Space, London, 2009 & 2010; Summer Show Underneath The Westway featuring a live recording studio, London 2009. The RRPL Magazine has been created to share elements of the archive and serve as a curated selective journey through the collection. A series of periodical portable exhibitions, it invites the reader to find their own connections and inspirations from the Library’s wide-ranging artefacts.
The Art Pavilion is found down by the canal in Mile End Park, Clifton Road, London E3 4QY – The big space is open every day, 11am until 8pm
4: Vanessa Garwood, Story Circles at Sim Smith Gallery – The exhibition is on now runs until 10th October 2025 “Sim Smith is delighted to announce British artist Vanessa Garwood’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Story Circles.
“The exhibition is a dance through the instinctive and subconscious world of womanhood, exquisitely traversing the realms of matriarchal storytelling and unapologetic contemporary depictions of the female experience today. Garwood trained as a classical painter in Florence and as a dancer. Both are evident in this exhibition. Delicate layers of coloured oil are outlined by fresco-like hands and feet, unmistakably rooted in the painting of the Italian Renaissance, however, in Garwood’s world these outlines serve to embody very real and very modern women in the throngs of life. They beat and breathe, grab, thrust, pick and slap, delineated by neon strokes of oil and supported by electrifying blocks of solid pigment.
The paintings are alive, vibrant and visceral, they have all of the energy of a rowdy street, a party or even a fight. The cliques of women in the larger paintings surround one and other, enclosing and binding the visual composition and the viewer at once. We are instantly confined and spellbound within a world of Garwood’s making. With physicality at the forefront of these paintings, they tell a story of what lies beneath common speech and action to a deeper level of communication, instinct and understanding.
Moments in the paintings give life to the unseen, the awkward, to memories and imagination. Garwood uses satire and humour to address these leitmotifs but also compassion, great skill and personal experience. Hierarchies play a part in the performance too, hierarchies between the protagonists in some cases but also hierarchies of moments throughout the female experience from childhood to adolescence and beyond. There are props in this subconscious world, lollipops, scissors, cards, objects of tricksters, friends, children and carers. The movements of these women are ambiguous, hazy and undecided, plaiting or pulling hair, laughing or crying, pulling or pushing, we are not sure.
“There is no ‘correct’ ending, or clear morality message; instead each painting establishes a cyclical world without beginning or end, where allegory and narrative become transformed to reveal a continuous story of play and power.” – Vanessa Garwood, August 2025
The women are unapologetic, they come in bras and trainers, heels, knickers and tracksuit bottoms. They are unbound by constructs and free, caught in a dream-like dance together and move as one. This is where the seduction lies in these paintings, in freedom and in connection, in friends, mothers, sisters, daughters, in ancestral understanding and new experiences. Garwood speaks to our collective experience as women, our need for female bonds both past and present and the chance to make the future ours”.
Sim Smith is found at 6 Camberwell Passage, Camberwell, London, SE5 0AX, The space is open Thursday, Friday and Saturday, 10am until 4pm, (11am until 5pm on Saturdays. The Vanessa Garwood exhibition is on now runs until 10th October 2025
5: The Art Car Boot Fair is only six days away now, it happens, as we may have said already, on Saturday September 20th over at Cubitt Square, Kings Cross, London. Midday until 6pm.
And to quote Fair founder Karen Ashton; “The Art Car Boot Fair is, as always, the sum of its parts – all of you artists and performers”. Here’s the art of five of them (or us, for I am one of the artists taking part again this year)
We have been counting down to this year’s fair on these pages, we will continue to count down to both the live event at Cubitt Square on Saturday September 20th and the online version that follows a week afterwards…
We do tend to repeat ourselves when under stress, getting deeper into the countdown to this year’s London Art Car Boot Fair now. Always an important date on the London art calendar and a mere nineteen days to go now, it was twenty-five and before that it was twenty-nine or maybe thirty last time we checked on the (not quite so vile) countdown. We will continue to feature participating artists as we count down to the annual event that once again is happening at at Lewis Cubitt Square, Kings Cross. We did bring you the artist line back at the end of June although there’s probably been an artist or two added since then – The artist line up for one of the London Art Year’s highlights that is the Art Car Boot Fair has now been announced.
The 2025 Art Car Boot Fair is just six days away now – Earlybird tickets are (still) on sale now via the Fair’s website (do make sure you look at the Earlybird ticket option just underneath the regular tickets, earlybird tickets are £10, while £5 tickets that get you in later/cheaper are a little further down the page).
Previously on these pages
Here’s Jim Bob once more…
Previously
THE ORGAN 