Head Space Daily Words...

I went into town today to buy some socks on Oxford Street. I got off the tube at Bond Street and walked my usual route down South Molton Street, did a left onto Brook Street, went past the Hendrix/Handel house, where shortly after, the street meets Hanover Square, which runs into Hanover Street, eventually leading on to Regent Street.  Whilst walking along Hanover Street, I went past an art gallery called Blain Southern. I’ve seen this gallery many times in the past but it has never occurred to me to actually go inside, so I didn’t take too much notice. Unless it is obvious that the gallery is for the general public, I am not usually that quick to dive in. Art galleries, I find, can feel like they are for a certain type of person – generally ones with money to burn – which rules me out. What attracted me to stop and look through the window were the bright colours from inside. Several paintings hung on the walls, depicting splodges of colour and along the wall, nearest to the window, was a neat column of brightly wrapped boiled sweets (See Daily Image.) The central support column in the room was encircled by the same multi coloured sweets and in one corner was a large pile of identical confectionary. The room was calling to me and after seeing a woman walk in off the street, I felt obliged to do likewise. The exhibition features a group of paintings by Damien Hirst called Visual Candy from the early 1990s and the arrangement of sweets covered by brightly coloured wrappers is by Felix Gonzales-Torres. It’s all good fun. The hand out that you pick up when you go in encourages you to pick up the sweets, take them, move them around, eat them, the idea being that they will be replenished at the end of each day and I suppose making the comment that art is always changing, evolving, temporary – or some such thought. Anyway, with the interactive nature of the exhibition in mind, I brought a pocket full of sweets home for my boys. My youngest son got stuck into his first boiled sweet and lo and behold, it pulled out a loose molar at the back of his mouth. Talk about evolution, that was performance art!! If you're in London, get yourselves down there, let your kids mess with some art, grab yourselves a boiled sweet and as the Arctic Monkeys say - suck it and see…

The Blain Southern Candy Web Page