Creative Boost

A therapeutic North London art trip, BDSM, repair and wreath making...

In case you need an alternative Christmas present with a red-and-green theme. I just thought I would start this December love letter by reminding you there are some prints available of me in bins. The full series of ‘Recovery’ can be found here with print details. Order by midday 17th December.

Collaboration with the brilliant Charles Emerson 2025

📣 Creative Stim

There are serious advantages to having an autistic teen. They wrap all the presents and have been knee deep in making chocolate truffles, nougat with pistachios and almonds, salted caramels, marshmallows and today florentines. The kitchen is sticky, the sugar rush is evident, those salted caramels are so good I have had to hide them.

Baking is a stim for my eldest.

A stim - for those who don’t know - is a repetitive action or sound (like hand-flapping, rocking, humming, or twirling hair), that people use to self-regulate emotions, manage sensory input (overload or underload), cope with stress, or express feelings.

We all need a stim especially around Christmas. I have been drawing a lot (more on that shortly) I am sitting at home with my kids around and sticky surfaces, and I need my stim: a North London art trip.

Cowboy (2022). 10 min, 40 sec

📣 See

Something for the senses

Karimah Ashadu - Tender at Camden Art Centre

10 Oct 2025 - 22 Mar 2026 FREE

Sometimes art gets you out of your head. Gives you space to breathe and be a part of another world. Ashadu’s mostly moving image show is presented as if you are walking into a sumptuous cave, it gives you the inclination to sit and watch. Her films captivate, exploring masculinity and devotion. In Cowboy the protagonist’s love of horses is so tangible and descriptive, you become part of his world.

In ‘Muscle’ you eyeball the intensity, and you almost becoming a part of this session of hard arsed guys pumping iron, watching voyeuristically at the edge of their performance.

There are three films, they are all powerful and connect you to Nigeria, another place and another time. They made me feel that good art transports us beyond our preoccupations.

I continued my North London art trip a couple of stops further on the Mildmay Line, to Kentish Town. I was beginning to feel better, more right in the head, freer.

Ryan Gander - I’ve fallen foul of my desire at Camden Art Projects

15 October 2025 - 18 January 2026 FREE

This is a first: To be talked to gently and sincerely by a philosophical harvest mouse. Entertaining, funny and also poignant. The mouse (voiced by Gander’s daughter) describes a nostalgia malaise, suggesting we embrace uncertainty, and talks (a mouse talking - nuts) about the sensation of seeing a new colour for the first time.

I was transfixed by the eloquence and the belief that I was somehow really listening to a mouse.

Check out the stuffed cats and other surprises too.

Onwards to Victoria Miro to see Chantal Joffe and other delights. Chalk Farm to Old Street on the Northern Line.

Chantal Joffe - I remember at Victoria Miro

14 November 2025–17 January 2026 FREE

How is it that Chantal Joffe with so few brushstrokes can describe a feeling so clearly. She taps into a nostalgia where someone else’s family, a dad holding up a tiny baby, three teenagers on the verge of diving into a lake - feels so familiar as if the characters that confront you are part of your hidden history, captured brazenly.

Victoria Miro is also showing some young painters, discovered at Frieze (under 30) and I loved these paintings too.

You have to walk through her prehistoric garden and brave the fantastically steep stairs and voila.

The Stories We Tell - Tidawhitney Lek, Emil Sands, Khalif Tahir Thompson

London Gallery II, 14 November 2025–17 January 2026 FREE

Three contrasting painters, painting in different places, conjuring up smell, light, atmosphere; and bodies grounded, made present with paint.

I love this Emil Sands below - for obvious reasons

Worth checking out Khalif Tahir Thompson and Tidawhitney Lek (detail)too

This outing - an excellent distraction - took about 3 hour. I got some great books from Camden Art Centre. I felt nourished and expanded and ready to embrace the sticky kitchen, and pondered on capturing nostalgia so that it seems relevant to the future.

📣 Coming Up

Drawn into the art world

I have had my head down drawing, so this will be a brief vaguely festive newsletter because I am excited to say that I am illustrating Hettie Judah’s book How to Enter the Art World to be published by Hoxton Mini Press in April. Since I have been trying to draw daily for the past year, it is easy and hard.

This is one of the illustration that didn’t make the cut. It is still my favourite.

📣 Recommendations

Stuff that fills my cup

Pillion - 1hr 47m -out now

Pillion is such a tender, hardcore and sensitive film. It is about love and BDSM bikers, and for a straight Mum - Skarsgård is so good in biker gear. Mostly, it’s the negation of what you want out of a relationship: What suits and what doesn’t.

It reminded me of seeing Nine and a Half Weeks with my best friend’s parents aged 16. It felt mildly uncomfortable. Importantly this film also highlights a wider landscape of queer identity.

Oh Mary at Trafalgar Theatre

Tickets from £25

My family - I am not included in this - do the New York Times crossword at the weekend. Oh Mary was flagged up and it sound worth seeing.

I got two £45 tickets. Then I talked to someone last night who saw it on Broadway and said it is better than Hamilton - so it could be good.

Get a ticket fast.

📣 To make

A Christmas Wreath DIY video

I shot of my brilliant gardening mentor Chloe Pooley. Get some moss and greenery and make your own. Excuse the cheesy music, I haven’t figured music rights…

📣 To read and stitch

Socks - Imaginative Mending

My Mum taught me to darn. Mending jumpers and sock is in my DNA. It was lovely to attend Celia Pym’s book launch for Socks - Imaginative Mending, with Surrey Square Primary Schools brilliant take on darning. It was good to see the final iteration of this mending project that started at NOW Gallery. We wanted a sustainable exhibition looking at how to creatively mend, understanding there’s no wrong way.

Here is Celia’s book of beautifully darned socks. Below, accompanied by thread from my grandmother and my treasured thread holder made by my Mum.

📣 To Listen

Time out to learn and mull

Here is Celia discussing darning with me: a CREATIVE BOOST on creative process and inspiration.

Celia’s philosophy on darning and her sense of the importance of repair in the everyday has always fascinated me. Her exquisite creations from moth eaten jumpers to a mended paper bag, scarred bright with multicoloured thread.

The focus is on the process, of taking a needle, some coloured wool and flourishing within this mundane task.

It feels good to hear about mending and repair.

Louis Theroux’s Interview with Marina Abramovic

Does Louis slightly struggled with Marina Abramovic? She says: “Louis you are old fashioned, you need to get more edgy.”

Abramovic talks about her difficult childhood and her cruel mother. She explains how art liberates herself from the past. A kind of repair, a tenuous link to above!

And of Ulay her x: “I stopped loving his smell”, and her talk of “spirited dinners.”

I am intrigued by her relationship between performance and pain, and the softness of someone who appears so invincible.

Lastly:

These were the last of the leaves today. As I gardened I listen an episode of This Jungian Life Podcast on gratitude. (Another good one is on denial and they do excellent dream interpretations!)

It was a thanksgiving episode and these three wise Jungian analysts discussed being open hearted about both joy and suffering, thanking the turkey for the life it has given us so we can feast; and that it never too late to express gratitude.

I felt a total sense of gratitude and satisfaction that I was outside improving someone’s garden and feeling useful. A robin followed me round - very cathartic.

📣 Festive love to all

Yearning, darning, arriving, journeying, making and creating - may your December and New Year be filled with good things.

Until 2026.