The opening months of 2025 found me in Washington, D.C., where I succumbed—quite helplessly, I must confess—to the charms of one of my perennial haunts, the National Gallery of Art. There, amidst the luminous canvases of 1874 Paris: The Impressionist Movement, I experienced that rarest of pleasures: the rekindling of an old romance with art itself. It was as though the ghosts of Tadema and Delauny had conspired to remind me why I first surrendered my soul to their world.
From the cultivated hush of Washington, I journeyed to the sun-burnished landscapes of the American Southwest for a retreat—part hiatus, part pilgrimage—before turning my compass back to Britain. Upon my return, I flitted about the capital’s cultural calendar, with the Royal Academy’s Brasil! Brasil!: The Birth of Modernism proving an exuberant feast for the senses—so vivid, so rhythmically intoxicating, one almost expected the very walls to break into a cosmic dance.
I then absconded to the more contemplative charms of Britain’s rural and coastal towns, where the air is salted with sea breeze and conversations with strangers often begin with weather and end with philosophy. It was there, between the pastoral and the maritime, that I gathered my thoughts, my sketches, and my resolve—ready to embark upon my next great work.
The FLUX Exhibition at The Bomb Factory in Marylebone returned in July 2025 as a beacon for emerging and mid-career talent—a four-day convergence where performance, painting, and installation flourish in equal measure. I felt that my painting Life I introduced a meditative interplay of colour, form, and spiritual undertone, offering a contemplative counterpoint to the event’s spirited dynamism.
Alongside, Gagosian’s Mayfair outposts present a season of refined provocations, from the tactile abstractions of Rudolf Stingel to the conceptual wit of Kathleen Ryan. White Cube, in its Chelsea and Bermondsey venues, orchestrates a global dialogue with the pyrotechnic works of Cai Guo-Qiang, the monumental scale of Andreas Gursky, and the exuberant abstractions of Beatriz Milhazes. Meanwhile, the Saatchi Gallery in Chelsea offers thematic spectacles—from the botanical rapture of FLOWERS to the rhythmic urban poetics of HIP HOP. Emily Kngwarray,The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House, and Bridget Riley my favorite at the Tate Modern, Ed Atkins, Computer Generated videos and juxtaposing 1922 Edward Burra and his enigmatic world at the Tate Britain.
Across the Atlantic, my painting Alchemy II is to be unveiled at the Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery in Washington, D.C., marking my debut within the Women of the DMV Artists Survey—a discerning platform celebrating the region’s most compelling female voices. I anticipate my participation in the Parallax Exhibition in Chelsea, London, before journeying to Venice this November, and returning to London in December for further engagements—details of which shall be revealed in due course.
I shall miss the vegetables and flowers I coaxed into life within friends’ gardens, and of which I was fortunate enough to savour a little. Yet what matters most is the quiet satisfaction of having contributed—of knowing that bees, wasps, birds, and, indeed, our own kind, will take their pleasure from it.
