In case of deepening loneliness, break glass

Sanford Vitrine is a repurposed display cabinet on the side of a southeast London house (part of the Sanford Housing Co-operative) which houses a collaborative curatorial project run by artists Natalia Janula and Estefania Araujo Bianchi. For this collaboration, Scottish artist Morag Keil has inserted an image that mimics the brickwork of the building, with missing bricks that reveal a stock image of an airbrushed domestic scene of multicultural adults smiling and sharing a healthy meal. This photographic trompe l’oeil becomes a violent and extra-powerful puncturing of architecture to provide a frame for an image of saccharine digital happiness. In the bottom right-hand corner of the frame, a silver sticker (a permanent feature of the installation) reads, “You Are Beautiful”. 

Keil often appropriates and re-presents the characteristics of branding strategies from advertising and social media. Her work reveals the insidious techniques promoting consumerist desire, as she foregrounds and subverts visual strategies exploited in multiple commercial environments. Her perceptions of behaviour are often premised on clichéd notions of how gender is performed, and the aesthetic landscape of post-financial crash and millennial precarity. “Behind Keil’s work is the demand to know why we live like this and the impulse to tear it all down,” critic Chris Fite-Wassilak has written, “but, until that happens, we wander.” Christabel Stewart

People at Blue Mountain Ranch write about living together in the mountains

There’s a questionnaire at the beginning of the book January Thaw devised by its authors, members of the Blue Mountain Ranch in Siskiyou County, California. Some sample questions: Do you feel deprived of material comforts at the ranch? What class do you come from? Do you ever go hunting? If not, would you like to? What work wouldn’t get covered if you didn’t do it? Do you express anger enough? What happens to anger that isn’t expressed?

Blue Mountain Ranch – a pseudonym to prevent the ranch from being overwhelmed with visitors – was established in 1968 as one of the earliest experiments in back-to-the-land collective living, or what is now called “intentional community”. The group – the youngest aged 1, the oldest 41 – had moved to the mountains to live off-grid according to the codes of the then-emergent counterculture – gender equality, non-nuclear-family child rearing, sexual freedom – informed by a version of Marxist-Leninism that, in the words of one member, provided a “mechanism” for “making talking happen”. 

January Thaw was published in 1974, written by the ranch’s first inhabitants, including some of its 15 children. The book covers the first few years of the ranch’s existence, with chapters or passages on illness, birth, death, firefighting, work and its distribution, collective child-raising and education, food provision, gardening, and everything else involved in the day-to-day running of a 60-person ranch. The lens – thrashing out a politics through the intimate relationships of the everyday – has become so quotidian in the decades since, that the book’s sharpness can feel shocking, from the observations made by a mother watching her ex-partner interact with their sleepy daughter at a dance, to discussions of experiments in collective childcare: “Judy … used to come in every morning with cookies and milk and kiss them good morning, sort of like a good fairy … Everyone else was in the other room fucking. (laughter).” But the brunt of the book is a messier muddle of voices and perspectives that include a lot of grit, and certain uncomfortable passages. January Thaw is a direct transmission from a moment in which applying political principles to the organisation of life felt wide open, as well as a record of a series of individuals whose lives since then are impossible to trace. Nell Whittaker

A series of vintage vases for wild and weedy displays are evidence of a life-long obsession

Constance Spry was one of the UK’s most famous gardeners and florists of the 20th century, and her arrangements – made between the 1920s and 1950s and employing  uncommon vegetation alongside cut flowers – have had a lasting impact on contemporary floristry. “The compositions and the colours and the flowers that she put together were utterly inspiring,” says Nikki Tibbles, founder of Wild at Heart, one of the UK’s most celebrated luxury florists whose arrangements are, like Spry’s, seasonal, local and experimental, using reeds, rushes and ferns alongside wild and farmed flowers. One of Tibbles’ favourite Spry installations, for example, featured huge concrete pots filled with cavolo nero.

To showcase her work, Spry created shallow vases of different styles and shapes. These are some of Tibbles’ collection, which she began collecting at car boots and antique markets as a teenager. She now has over 100 of the unassuming but expressive off-white containers, some with bent handles like someone standing with their hands on their hips, and some with celebratory arms in the air. Above all, they are welcoming. “You can put any flower in these vases,” says Tibbles. “Different shapes, sizes, heights, depths and lengths, plus things that overflow.” Tibbles most recently used the vases for S.S. Daley’s first-ever womenswear show in September 2024, which was based around the work of Gluck, mononymous painter and a partner of Spry. Tibbles and Daley bonded over a mutual love of the two artists and the vases. “I only buy a vase if it looks beautiful without flowers,” Tibbles says. “For me, a good vase looks absolutely beautiful naked.” Nell Whittaker

American artist Ray Johnson gives a whole  new meaning to party hopping

In Ray Johnson’s deliberately misspelled “A Mysterious New York Correspondance School Meeting”, a veritable who’s who of the 1960s New York art scene, including Nam June Paik, Cy Twombly and Diane Arbus, among others – is illustrated as an enormous patchwork of bunnies. Often referred to as the originator of mail art, the practice of sending small artworks through the postal system, Johnson preferred the term “correspondance art”, the misspelling a nod to the Fluxus notion of movement and process over the finished product. This work is one of many Johnson sent to his circle of friends, later known colloquially as the New York Correspondence School, inviting them to one of his Nothing performances. Some were aligned with similar Fluxus happenings, others were imaginary, speculative, activated upon opening the letter. 

Notoriously impish and inscrutable, Johnson, who died in 1995, did not outwardly comment on the art world and its savage hierarchies. In some sense, there was a democratic ethos in his work, with every invitee afforded equivalent space and visual representation on the page. Yet the medium of “correspondance art” did not allow for a communal experience of viewership as each work was limited by its one-to-one terms of engagement. Johnson’s work rendered social networks as simultaneously hyper-visible and nebulous, celebrating the beauty of interconnectedness while winking at the gossipy, ultimately self-serving dynamics of the communal form. In his own words: “My correspondance art only exists for one person – me”. Matteo Pini

Brushed aluminium, white wax, smoke trails and two lovebirds – now that’s a tablescape

Though they may initially appear to be the outline of a cumulus cloud or the borders of a former Yugoslav republic, the ragged contours of Louis Barrett’s Beyda coffee table are actually modelled from cross sections of a rock found in the Sahara el Beyda, Egypt. Atop its adamantine aluminium surface sit candlesticks and a cocktail stick holder from tablescape designer Fiona Leahy. The lovebirds share a chaste kiss; the candles have just gone out. Leahy’s tablescapes can be elaborate or restrained, but they share an essential purpose – to bring people together in communion. This is a scene as much about storytelling as pure design, inviting those around to sit a while, and see what happens. Matteo Pini

Crack a can – and make sure your money’s doing something useful

Calls to boycott Coca-Cola have intensified over the last year, due to the Central Beverage Company (also known as Coca-Cola Israel) operating a distribution centre and cool rooms in the Atarot Settlement Industrial Zone, the Israeli occupation of which is – according to the ICC – a war crime. For cola lovers who want to send a message to corporations profiting from conflict and colonialism, there’s now Gaza Cola, a “100% apartheid-free” soft drink that looks to provide an alternative to Coke, as well as a revenue stream back to Palestine to aid in rebuilding al-Karama Hospital, in northern Gaza.

The cola was conceived in 2023 by activist and filmmaker Osama Qashoo, who is the founder of Palestine House, a London-based cultural centre and community space set up in 2024 as a “cultural embassy” open to all Palestinians and their advocates. Forms of cultural exchange that generate authentic community engagement are the holy grail for most big brands, but here, the money flows backwards in the hope of sustaining life, not profit. Nell Whittaker

Will they, won’t they – Kasia Fudakowski offers two routes for artistic collaboration

One Decision Piece/Two Half Decision Pieces is published by ublication, a press involved with artists who use printed matter as an artistic strategy, often by exploiting and expanding upon their implicit nature as randomly accessible sequences of words and images. As the exhibition notes for a 2014 exhibition of artist’s books declare, the printed page holds together “a certain surplus of vitality, a metaphoric, affective and social overflow”.

This print was created by London-born artist Kasia Fudakowski, who devised “doubtful doing”, a mechanism that allows the artist to both “do” and “not do” at the same time, inspired by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s 1843 book Either/Or. That work was conceived as a series of short essays exploring moral responsibility, critical reflection, and aesthetics that together create a philosophy that investigates the conflict between the aesthetic and the ethical. As these essays contemplate the difference between a hedonistic, aesthetic life and an ethical life – in other words, the search for a meaningful existence – so Fudakowski’s work blends the pros and the cons of collaboration.

Her decision pieces posit phrases and ideas representing choice, posing these questions to the reader in a kaleidoscope of opposites. To accompany the deciding, she recommends the 1976 Dory Previn song “Children of Coincidence”, which emulates the human condition of living in chance: “Crossed connections, lost connections / Empty corners, crowded intersections / Accidents and incidents / We are children of coincidence and chance.” Christabel Stewart

The hook is the sartorial shadow of the partygoer – when you take off your coat, the hook puts it on 

In Hook Book almost 1000 (2024), Italian designer Martino Gamper hangs his latest curiosity on the unassuming wall hook. Gamper experiments with the hook’s form across a taxonomy of materials – powder-coated steel, soda-lime glass and marble, to name just a few –  and flicking through the pages of the pearly-pink book, the reader sees the hook shift from furnishing afterthought to Gamper’s personal preoccupation and an icon of design.

Affixed to the back of doors or tucked neatly under stairs, hooks are dressed and undressed. Slung with coats, scarves and bags, their curved arms welcome whatever gets thrown their way. In many ways, hooks are always being redesigned by simply fulfilling their most intrinsic purpose. They are accessorised and stripped again, becoming stand-ins for the people in the room. Gamper’s hooks maintain aesthetic identities that don’t rely on their collective “decoration” but instead become a series of totally singular archetypes.  Olivia Barrett

Your name’s not down. You’re not coming in

At the recent exhibition Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London at the Fashion and Textile Museum, amid outlandish outfits from scene stalwarts BodyMap and Leigh Bowery, it was a guest list that provided the most intrigue. Taken from the monthly residency hosted by Iain R. Webb and Tony Gordon at Maximus, a venue that several years earlier had hosted Gordon and Bowery’s notorious Taboo nightclub, the list boasts some of the era’s glitterati – Jasper Conran, The Edge, Judy Blame – alongside what one Maximus attendee described as “fabulous nobodies”. Here was a club where Sue Tilley’s adage – “Dress as though your life depends on it or don’t bother” – was stringently policed with a door policy notorious for sending hopeful attendees home with a withering put-down. 

In contrast to the contemporary clubbing paradigm, in which the rules of engagement encourage safety and cleanly delineated codes of conduct, Maximus was a space of sensation and risk. The guest list, scrawled with last-minute additions, speaks to the scrappy physicality involved in pre-digital event programming, as well as exposing the illusion of scarcity upon which the guest list relies. Webb and Gordon’s night catered to their network of fellow glamorous, eccentric and queer partygoers, and for those bold enough to embody the decade’s uncompromising spirit, the guest list was more than just an invitation – it was a declaration of belonging. Matteo Pini

Image courtesy of Iain R. Webb

She’s spinning around – get out of her way. An ode to the Lazy Susan

Silently spun between garrulous diners, Lazy Susan is seen and not heard. Commanded by touch and devoid of resistance, she is grappled and twirled, both the centre of attention and utterly ignored. Piled high with plates and bowls of food, her docile name betrays her constant revolutions. Thomas Jefferson is credited with having invented the Lazy Susan for his daughter of the same name in the late-18th century. English poet Christopher Smart praised the discretion of the rotational device in the 1750s, and in 1903 the Boston Journal rhapsodised about how “she simply minds her business and carries out your orders in a jiffy”. 

Now positioned as a rather kitschy implement within the ever- evolving culture of dining, the Lazy Susan conjures images of carpeted 1970s dinner parties, pineapple and ham hedgehogs or bustling dim sum restaurants. The same way a fireplace beckons cold bodies around its hearth, these spinning Susans induce a very physical form of communal gathering. With hunched shoulders and elbows rooted firmly to the table, eaters lurch towards the silent waitress, relinquish eye contact and muddle conversation, all in favour of catching a plate as it completes its rounds. Despite distilling the eating experience to a circulation of food and utensils, in some sense the ease afforded by the swivelling subordinate flattens all the clunky human interactions that occur between moments of eating and drinking: the impolite reaching over, the spillages, the “can you please pass the salt?” Of course, Susan is just trying to do her job, but she’s also a standard bearer for the personable moments that are lost when eating together becomes all too easy. Olivia Barrett

Shot on location at Park Chinois