January: Recommendations to Start Your Month
10 Useful Things
Friends,
Happy New Year from the Namibian bush! (🦁🌞)
Here’s 10 Useful Things that found me this past month.
PS: please scroll to the end for a little South African playlist.
How to curb your phone addiction. (I highly recommend Namibia as a destination if you’re wanting an extremely offline break)
I was lucky enough to attend a private viewing + Q&A of the incredible Tish Murtha documentary this month. After the show, Paul Sng (Director); Jen Corcoran (Producer) and Tish’s daughter, Ella, stayed behind for a truly special Q&A. Tish’s photography focussed on working class communities in the North East of England, capturing the poverty and the unemployment caused by the impact of deindustrialisation by the then UK Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. As is a common theme with women in art,1 I’d never heard of Tish or her photography before I watched the documentary - what an honour to know of her now.2
Her prints are available exclusively from the British Culture Archive, this one below is my favourite.
Gooey double chocolate olive oil loaf cake with toasted hazelnuts & whipped cream.
I absolutely loved this story about Titus Kaphar.
In keeping with my seagull obsession since I moved to the beach, a wonderful listen & learn about Lesbian Seagulls.
A story of queer nature and scientists in denial, featuring seagulls, penguins, rams, swans, dolphins, and—maybe the gayest animal of all—humans.
Was not surprised to learn that Edmund de Waal’s dog matches his pottery palette.
As de Waal worked, his dog, Isla, sat in a corner, chewing on a torn-up plush pheasant. I asked how many dog hairs he thought had become embedded in his pots over the years. ‘‘Oh, just a wonderful number,’’ he said.
On being a woman on the internet.
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/art-world-deep-rooted-misogyny/
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/9-reasons-art-world-is-unfair-1726653
Namibia!!? Do you live there or are you visiting?
Funny story about that one song in your playlist: Most of my childhood I thought they sang, "I test the rains down in Africa." 😂😂 I always wondered what they were testing for hahaha.
These are so nourishing - love the "wonderful number" and I've been observing way too much of the insidious "women don't X well" trope these days so it really helps to see it named in your stellar links