CREATIVE BOOST
Art, cocktails, making, your monthly cultural kick
As an artist, drawer, filmmaker, darner, gardener, and cook — I know that these little bits of creativity work for me. I also know that going to galleries and sucking up and digesting art makes me feel good. And alive.
Here are my top tips for Oct/Nov. I would love to hear about anything you’ve seen or done that addresses that creative nub in you. I’ve ordered my tulips — they’re now a bargain at Crocus 🌱 and worth investing in for some spring joy.
📣 See
For when you need art that jolts your system awake
Lucy Raven: Rounds at the Barbican
Thu 9 Oct 2025—Sun 4 Jan 2026 | The Curve | FREE
Go watch this film. I sat there mesmerised.
I watched it twice through. Partly because I was sitting next to some fine gentleman who wore a fancy shirt. I commented on it and we got chatting, while we watched a river gushing through a hole in a dam, billowing out towards the sea. Eventually, he asked my name. I said '“Jemima”, and he said “And your surname”. He said he was an artist and I was nervous I wouldn’t know his work. He said he was called “Gary”, and I asked his surname and he said “Hume”. Aka a big man from those YBAs.
I often go to private views on my own, and often kick myself as I want to chat with someone about what I have seen. On this occasion I lucked out, I got to watch the film for as long as I wanted and got excellent chat with Gary about his one technician who comes in once a week and is not allowed to do the black lines as they would be too perfect.
Blissful creative chat.
The film is worth seeing for the epicness of water, focused on the biggest dam removal and river restoration project in US history. Using aerial and underwater imaging, the camera captures a landscape in flux, following the immense release of water as it carves its own path for the first time in over 100 years. I came away wondering about the effect of this flow and how damming affects communities worldwide.
Peter Doig: House of Music at The Serpentine
10 October 2025 - 8 February 2026 | FREE | A Great Half Term Outing
I loved the music in this show and the chairs so you can sit and ogle at Doig’s paintings, taking time to enjoy. Doig has collaborated with Laurence Passera, an expert in sound systems who I saw at Frieze and who said he was still tinkering with the sound. It was definitely an ongoing project. The music hits you in the gut as you enter and is such an alien sound in a gallery and so what we need right now.
My favourite painting is below. It has the depth and description of space Doig does so well.
📣 Hear
Check out Sunday Sound Service at the Serpentine where guests invited by Peter Doig share their selected tracks and audio samples responding to one another in new and unexpected acoustic exchanges in front of a live audience. Participants will include Lizzi Bougatsos, Dennis Bovell, Brian Eno, Andrew Hale, Linton Kwesi Johnson and more to be announced.
Sunday 2 November 12pm - I plan to go to this!!
Duval Timothy will share some of his own music alongside a selection of music by friends and artists that inspire him. Pared back works, instrumentals and soundscapes.
3pm
Santiago Mostyn: a live listening session where we tune in, speculatively, to Radio Free Grenada, the national radio station of revolutionary Grenada (1979–1983).
Danielle Mckinney: Second Wind at Max Hetzler
18 September – 1 November 2025 I Closing soon!!! | FREE
To an artist at the relative beginning of their career who - like Doig - holds a room.
It was a pleasure to see Danielle McKinney’s diminutive paintings. She was a photographer who started painting during lockdown and made massive strides in fixing a world on canvas. The dark brown hues with light paint peppering the surface creating masterful scenes where naked women own their space. The paintings are raw and yet poised and complete.
Danielle says that: Watercolour elicit mistakes. The women appear settled and bleed mildly into their surrounding white paper.
Stunning. Get one now! Selling at over 200k at auction.
📣 Make
Because doing something with your hands is half the cure.
Make Collage at Tracey Neuls with Louisa Tan, founder of Common Exception Studio - Quote TENCOLTN for 10% off
12th November | 6.30pm and 7.30pm | £13
I love collaborating with Tracey and coming up with events that work with her beautiful shoes hanging around us while we create. Her boutique in Marylebone with Marylebone lights and festive excitement in the neighbourhood firing up that evening, while we will have a hub of creativity.
Louisa Tan is known for her bold, playful work and for her collage actives that bring people together - focusing on belonging, connection and this evening encouraging shoe-inspired collage with bells on.
I hope to see you there.
📣 Eat
Food as love not just fuel
Anyone inundated with apples? This is my favourite recipe for using up the slightly manky ones.
My Mum was a terrible cook - truly. She ate to live not to enjoy. She did do a good stewed red cabbage and a very dodgy tomato sauce with undercooked onions and whole pepper corns in it.
Grab 1 red onion, half a small red cabbage, 4 cloves of garlic, 6 small dodgy apples from someone else’s garden, a couple of bay leaf, thyme, vinegar and maple syrup and left over red wine if you have it.
In a large saucepan, fry the chopped onion in olive oil until soft Add chopped garlic and the diced red cabbage. Cut up the apples and add them in small chunks, then add a splash of red wine, a chug of cider vinegar and a gulp of maple syrup. Season with salt, pepper, the bay leaves and a pinch or sprig of thyme. Cook slowly for an hour.
Served with sausages and baked potatoes. Eat cold out of the fridge the next day.
If anyone needs more precise measurements - let me know. I come from Elizabeth David kind of cooking.
Cooking is a creative activity for me; the less I have to follow a recipe, the happier I am.
📣 Drink
Question - where can I get a good cocktail?
I was a cocktail waitress at university and served my fair share of Orgasms and Slow Comfortable Screws Against a Wall to steaming men in suits. I do love a cocktail — more specifically, a Sidecar. It’s a margarita with brandy instead of tequila, and it’s the only drink that makes me smile immediately.
I can make it at home, and in a previous life I used to get a mean, smart, expensive one from Sketch. Can anyone suggest a good cocktail bar to check out before the run-up to Christmas?
📣 If I wasn’t here, where would I be:
Please add to this in the comments. I want to build up a delicious international mix of creative excitement.
New York
Ana Mendieta’s exhibition Back to the Source at Marian Goodman
A brilliant artist who used fire, earth, blood and performance to examine ritual.
7 November 2025 - 17 January 2026 PV: Friday, 7 November, 6 - 8 pm
📣 Listen
To more about Ana Mendieta in the gripping podcast Death of An Artist examining her relationship with the artist Carl Andre, who was under scrutiny after she ‘fell’ out of a window to her death. This had me gripped driving 13 hours from London to Marseille.
📣 Beyond London
Last thought and a must. If you become a paid subscriber we will make a trip there:
William Kentridge: The Pull of Gravity at Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Sat 28 Jun 2025–Sun 19 Apr 2026
Kentridge features megaphone women in his films. I saw his exhibition at the Whitechapel after my Mum died, and I knew that I wanted to be a megaphone woman. He is the one artist I truly love and this is me at a lecture he gave in Oxford with my WW2 megaphone my brother gave me.
Creativity is the ability to feel wonder and the desire to respond to what we find startling - From Kae Tempest On Connection
Guardian Review here. I am loving this thoughtful book.
Well done, this is wonderful, wish I was in London to make use of it. You are inspiring ❤️
Hurrah!