Steve_Bamlett_blog

Unexpected pleasures on my London trip: I find Louise at home in the Turbine Hall  inviting me to see her Maman – being the second day of my London trip (July 2 2025)

This is the first of three accounts of my second day of my two days away referenced in the blog at this link. The first day was mainly an account of seeing My Master Builder (the blog is here) but also of a late night picking up a drink at a club with Claire (for me 11 p.m. is unthinkable, as are usually clubs). It was a busy day and my room at the Kings Cross Point A hotel was hot and noisy and I woke up at 6.30 a.m. and finished my blog with my friend Claire on my mind.

Perhaps the day started as it finished with an exhausted walk along Tavistock Place to and from the hotel with Tavistock Square as starting and end point of the obligatory ride (brandishing my pensioner’s bus pass) on a 68 bus (above). Yet the bit in between though I failed to attend one event – the heat of the day and the travel involved exhausted my limited resources: Giuseppe Penone at the Serpentine Gallery. On the bus I heard from Geoff that he was dining in Bishop Auckland and that he and Daisy were fine. He sent me this:

Alighting outside the Hayward Gallery, I found my success with buses at an end and I had to take a taxi to Tate Britain in order to get to my appointed visit time (11 a.m.) at the gallery. Of that visit, that stays with the Edward Burra retrospective exhibition and omits the Ethell Colquhoun one, which frankly I found unexciting and not to my liking, you can read in a blog to follow this one, once I have my head round reading the catalogue and assembling my pictures.

This blog concerns things I had not expected to experience thence. Having seen Burra (oh how I wish I could have spent more time) and being indifferent to Colquhoun, I inquired about the best means of getting to the Doh Suh exhibition at Tate modern. The lovely young man who sold me my catalogue also advised I take the river bus from the Millbank pier, across the road from Tate Britain to Bankside pier, outside the Globe and a brief walk to Tate Modern. This was the first of my new experience – and being the first things went wrong. I took the first boat I found at the pier only to find myself heading west to Putney. A kind conductor dropped me free at the next stop (St. George’s Wharf) and within five minutes I took the next downriver river bus. Mistakes and errors define new experiences but the thrill exceeded the stress of the errors. Sitting at the prow I loved the zig-zag travel bus path between stops on the north and south banks through the stolid thick air otherwise of that sultry hot and humid day.

That prepared me to enjoy the Doh Suh exhibition. I don’t know the artist but the advertising intrigued me. All that will come in the third of this day’s blogs when I have finished reading the catalogue and said my piece on Burra in the second. Perhaps the biggest excitement of the day came in between.

I love the art of Louise Bourgeois and mourn her passing (see past blogs on a book of her paintings here, on work with Gary Indiana here, on her woven art at a past exhibition at the Hayward Gallery here, and on some of the smaller versions of her art of the spider – those creatures of weaving mystery – at Tate Liverpool here. The penultimate and final blogs in this list show my fascination with Bourgeois’s arachnid mothers: ‘My mother was a kind of weaver’. In Liverpool, you shudder

Louise Bourgeois, Spider I 1995 ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Lent by the Easton Foundation 2013. My photographs.

In the Hayward Gallery woven weavers you see the fearsome protectiveness of the mother creatures that nevertheless en-cell what they love and what they hate:

What I had not expected wasto enter the bag check at the huge entrance to the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern to see in front of me one of the huge metal Maman sculptures I have always longed to see in the flesh tha I have seen in photographs outside the museums of Europe. But there she was, standing on the bridge – too self-absorbed to wave a leg (at least one of the eight) at me:

There is something wonderful then in my feelings as I approach her:

The Doh Suh exhibition is in the Blavatnik building, which I have never entered and I sought long and hard in the building i did know (to the north of the turbine hall, before discovering it on the south). But whilst I looked from floor to floor in my usual venues for exhibition joy, views of Maman accompanied me from slightly above her:

As I looked down I saw the Blavatnik building sign as she stood still against what in my photographs of fast moving visitors and some who gathered inexplicably beneath one of her legs.’Were they not afraid’, I thought. Certainly as I joined them on the bridge, I felt some of the awesome grandeur that kept me, at least, from crossing the bridge under her:

In the Blavatnik building up another stairway I was entranced by Doh Suh. When I returned to the bridge, on my way on I dared to tread toward and under Maman’s centre – even to gaze at that sac of ultimately encaged eggs. Even looking back I shudder with fear and delight at the awesome creature:

Thiswas an unexpected treat. Why do we so delight in images of our darkest fears I wonder.

Exhausted by all this I decided there and then NOT to travel west again to the Serpentine Gallery and went instead to a favoured art bookshop where I found at last a beautiful second hand copy of a book I have long wanted on Félix Valloton.

I trudged to a pizza house on the South bank that I favoured, and thence, rested now – where else – to the 68 bus stop outside the Hayward Gallery on Waterloo Bridge.

All for today. And I have another blog on queer woodcut book illustrations before I return to the London blogs. Bye for now.

With love

Steven xxxxxxxxx