Around The Globe With – Anouska Beckwith

✦ Last month I was lucky enough to go to Dumfries in Scotland with a childhood who was kind enough to take me to The Garden of Cosmic Speculation a 30 acre sculpture garden created by landscape architect and theorist Charles Jencks at his home, Portrack House, near Dumfries in South West Scotland.

✦ When I returned to London I was desperate to go see the live Butterfly exhibition at the Natural History Museum as I am a huge fan of butterflies as I have used them as a recurrent theme throughout my work and home. So I took my little sister Vivi who literally thought we were in heaven and was so excited to see hundreds of butterflies flying around us.

✦ Later in the week my good friend and curator Thomas Dodd took me to see Maisie Cousins first solo show ‘grass, peonie, bum’ at T J Boulting. Her use of color and texture is absolutely stunning and in the basement of the gallery she had created a special womb like feeling with the floor and walls which really made her photos and videos pop!

✦ The following week was Photo London at Somerset House where my mother’s gallery, The Little Black Gallery had its booth for the fantastic photographer Rob Munday who’s 3D photographs of flowers were meet with a huge success. What makes Munday so special is a that he has grown the flowers from seeds he has collected from all over the world. My favourite pieces from the entire exhibition were Melvin Sokolsky, Gregor Tores, Stephen Wilkes, Marianna Rothen, William Eggleston and Michal Macku.

✦ A few days later Tory Burch opened her brand new store on Regent Street which my friend Flo Morrissey and I attended together. The store looked absolutely beautiful as it had been designed by Tory herself. Afterwards she threw the most beautiful dinner at Isabel where I bumped into Mary Charteris – Furze who had just come back from LA. During the dinner I had the pleasure of sitting next to the English rose Cressida Bonas, who was telling me all about her role as Daisy Fay Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. The whole of Tory Burch had really outdone themselves and everyone went away saying what a masterpiece the whole evening had been.

✦ During the New Year I was lucky enough to meet the fantastic German Artist Julius Von Bismark, who was in London exhibiting ‘Home Is Not A Place’ at the German Embassy for a group show curated by Corlay Von Bismark, which was show in response to Brexit. The exhibition shows works of contemporary British and German artists who have worked and lived in Berlin and London. The varied artistic ideas are visualised across a range of practices, spanning painting, textile, sculpture, photography, and video. The contemporary artists include Cornelia Baltes Simon Fujiwara, Oliver Osborne, Random International, Florian Roithmayr, Daniel Sinsel, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Nicole Wermers. Being slightly biased I loved Julius’s ‘History Apparatus’.