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«What I love about these two shows, the series and the film, Y Sŵn,
is that they sit comfortably in the Welsh language and there isn’t an Englishonly version», said Lewis Jones, referring to the recent practice of filming first
in one language and then the other, a process used for other popular Welsh
shows, such as Keeping Faith.
«I don’t treat the Welsh language work as some sort of passion project,
they are as important to me as the English shows», he added.
(https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/apr/01/this-is-a-real-
moment-netflix-series-cements-rise-of-welsh-language-drama)
Article 2. Elton John review – cheers, tears and a stairlift to heaven
The Guardian, Kitty Empire
Sat 1 Apr 2023 14.00 BST
Elton John’s hands bang on the piano chords at the start of Bennie and
the Jets, the opening number of this valedictory set. Staccato and emphatic,
the notes underline John’s first calling as a piano man, one elevated by the
wider cultural moment of the early 1970s into a larger-than-life public figure.
Known for so much beyond his songs – from moving the dial on the pub-
lic perception of HIV / Aids, to successfully suing the Sun for libel, to being
Eminem’s unlikely AA sponsor – John is now on the very final leg of a farewell tour that, he promises, is genuinely his last. Tonight, his hands are often
displayed on the big screens during a two-plus hour show heavy on fan service,
racing dexterously up and down the keys while the singer often glances round
the audience, grinning. Every song ends with Elton standing up, just a little
stiffly post-hip surgery, to acknowledge his fans.
His mercurial chops are echoed by a great set of fellow players who have
been with him, off and on, for years. Given his infamous volatility – not for noth-
ing is one of his more raucous autobiographical tunes called The Bitch Is Back –
the patience of this band remains a credit to a complex man. Underneath all the
hats and glasses, it’s possible to discern the old-school musician’s musician whose
place in what Leonard Cohen called «the tower of song» is assured.
It does feel like several lifetimes ago that Reginald Dwight came up along-
side all the other talented rhythm and blues fans of the era, many of whom
would join him in household name status. Elton John could match John Lennon
for acerbic put-downs; play tit-for-tat pranks with Rod Stewart; did not get on
22
with David Bowie. In his harrowing, must-read 2019 memoir, Me, multiple episodes vie for the prize of «peak Elton». Was it the time he rang his record
company to demand they turn down the wind outside? Or the occasion that he
pelted Bob Dylan with oranges for not knowing how to play charades?
Even by John’s maximalist standards, the Farewell Yellow Brick Road
tour has been a long goodbye. Having begun in 2018 and pausing for Covid,
it was dry docked again in 2021 for Elton’s hip replacement. When the road
finally ends in Stockholm on 8 July, FYBR will close having broken the
record for the highest-grossing tour ever – $800m (£650m), according to
estimates.
Given this aversion to things done by halves, it figures that John’s band
features not one, but three percussionists: white-gloved drummer Nigel Olsson, plus multi-instrumentalists Ray Cooper and John Mahon on everything
from maracas to vibraslap. All the rhythm tonight actually makes Elton’s tunes
more ear-ringing, and more nuanced. In this long saunter through the hits, one
deep cut – Have Mercy on the Criminal – features a lyrical Mahon xylophone
part that vies with Davey Johnstone’s searing electric guitar.
The extended instrumental outro to Rocket Man, meanwhile, is positively
crawling with texture and noises off, rejuvenating a song whose anomie can
now sometimes feel a little defanged through overexposure. Elton’s voice is
in such fine fettle that he constantly projects to the back of the room: showmanship that sometimes robs his singing of emotional light and shade.
Billed as one of his favourites, Someone Saved My Life Tonight is that
rare thing in Elton’s catalogue – a song actually about his own internal
weather. Lyricist Bernie Taupin memorialised a very low point in his friend’s
life when the miserable younger Dwight was about to marry someone unsuitable; he even attempted suicide in a bid to escape. Oddly, it’s down to
Cooper’s ferocious work on the timpani to drive the feeling home.
Candle in the Wind, meanwhile, goes big on footage of Marilyn Mon-
roe – a 20th-century icon, Taupin has said, who really stands in for all the
stars who died before their time. Peel back the layers the song has acquired
and within this performance is a real and moving sense that Elton realises
his good fortune, now able to hang up his outlandish headgear and watch
his kids grow up. You do also get the sense of one century very much segueing into another here in Birmingham. However dressed up some of Elton
John’s fans are tonight, they’re no match for the elves and pixies thronging
the Megacon event at the NEC next door.
23
And when he finally takes his leave – after the disco version of Cold
Heart, as remixed by Pnau and Dua Lipa, his most recent hit, and Your Song,
his very first one – Elton John ascends into his starry sky backdrop in a kind
of Perspex stair lift. He is both over the top and impishly self-aware to the last.
(https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/apr/01/elton-john-resorts-
world-arena-birmingham-review-farewell-yellow-brick-road-cheers-tearsand-a-stairlift-to-heaven)
Article 3. Mary McCartney looks back: «My childhood gave me
a curiosity for the behind-the-scenes moments»
The Guardian, Harriet Gibsone
Sat 1 Apr 2023 12.00 BST
Born in London in 1969, Mary McCartney is a photographer, film-maker,
presenter and vegetarian cookbook author. The eldest daughter of musician
Paul McCartney and photographer Linda McCartney, Mary’s childhood was
spent on the road with Wings and in studios such as Abbey Road, about which
she made a documentary, If These Walls Could Sing, in 2022. She lives in
London with her film-maker husband, Simon Aboud, and has four sons. Mary
has curated Sea Views, an online exhibition for the luxury cruise line Cunard,
featuring archive imagery and submissions from the public.
This was taken in Nashville. I’m wearing a lanyard as I had been com-
missioned by the Country Music Awards to take portraits of all the winners
and nominees like Loretta Lynn, Kid Rock, Shooter Jennings and Lynyrd
Skynyrd. Wandering around the hotel on my way to the event I saw this row
of mirrors: I’m attracted to shiny things and loved the repeat image of myself
so I took the photo. It was a spontaneous moment and I really liked the camera
being in it, too – something you wouldn’t get with a selfie today.
The trip to Nashville felt like stepping into a different world. Thirty-
five is an interesting age, it’s neither young nor old, and at this stage of my
life I was learning so much about myself. I was a late bloomer, and remember feeling as if my confidence was really starting to build. I loved to be
invited into new places; to step into the unknown. So when I was invited to
a party at a mansion after the awards I lapped it up! It was incredibly exciting, I was busy observing all the guests when someone opened a little door
and all this gun smoke came billowing out. They had a two-lane shooting
range off their kitchen! It blew my mind.
24
Wandering and exploring has always been important to me. When this
picture was taken I had two kids, but I was also starting to pursue these adventures. I was loving my career, developing my portfolio. Getting the call to
do the Nashville job came out of the blue, and my decision to accept it really
felt as if I was stepping out of my comfort zone, immersing myself in a new
culture. Photography gave me a shortcut to forming a relationship with these
unfamiliar people.
Having grown up on tour, I was comfortable around musicians.
My childhood gave me a curiosity for the behind-the-scenes moments: what
happens before the main event. I love to see the practice that people go through
to become the best in their field. It’s something I observed from my dad.
He has always been so supportive of my career and is the first person I show
around an exhibition. He’s always genuinely interested. Often I’ll show him a
selection of images and ask his opinion.
My mother’s photographs also had a huge influence on me. We definitely
have a similar shooting style, black and white images particularly – there’s a
timelessness to them. In this photo I like that you can’t tell my age, the colour
of my clothes – a denim skirt and a floral Laura Ashley shirt, which I wore
because it was so hot in Nashville.
Beyond her shooting style, I also inherited her temperament: Mum made
people feel at ease and that’s how I approach things, too. I would never go in and
impose myself. I’d much rather assess the situation and get to know the subject
better, gauge what will make them feel comfortable and then challenge it.
That type of sensitivity comes from my teen years too. I was an awkward
adolescent and so, as an adult, I found it easy to empathise with someone else’s
feelings of being uncomfortable or stressed. While I had a few really close
friends as a teen, my family moved around a lot so it was not easy to sustain a
relationship. I also didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life.
The hormones didn’t help with the awkwardness, either. I shook it all off when
I left school, the hormones calmed down and my self-belief began to grow.
When I found photography in my 20s it made me happy and excited, and
through doing this I’ve grown to know myself more.
(https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/apr/01/mary-mccart-
ney-looks-back-my-childhood-gave-me-a-curiosity-for-the-behind-thescenes-moments)
25
Article 4. The National 4: major survey of contemporary Australian
art invites a closer look
The Guardian, Tai Mitsuji
Sat 1 Apr 2023 01.09 BST
The entry hall at the Art Gallery of New South Wales is lined with por-
traits of First Nations women. No explanation is given on the plaque for
Brenda L Croft’s Naabami (thou shall / will see): Barangaroo (army of me)
(2019-22). It needs none. Hanging beside the entrances to the AGNSW’s
Grand Courts – a series of galleries that have long been a home for «high»
European and Australian art – Croft’s photographs are striking statements
of First Nations presence.
If one needs a more pointed directive, they only have to turn their head to
the opposite wall and see Abdul Abdullah’s painting Decisions (2022), which
broadcasts the words «Have a think about it».
It’s the perfect way to frame the fourth iteration of the biennial survey of
Australian art, The National, which is clearly looking to expand our under-
standing of art’s protagonists through 48 new projects, involving more than
80 artists. The show opened on Thursday across four of Sydney’s cultural in-
stitutions: AGNSW, Carriage works, the Museum of Contemporary Art
(MCA) and Campbell town Art Centre.
Further into the AGNSW’s showing is Gerry Wedd’s Where Are We
Now? (2020-23), which takes the traditional – almost innocuous – aesthetic of
blue and white ceramic wares and turns it on its head: on second glance, the
661 pieces of ceramic include vessels emblazoned with the names of drugs –
«Lithium», «MDMA», «Xanax» – while his tiles against the wall depict existentially charged imagery: a lone syringe, a blindfolded man, a razor blade.
«The blue and white is a Trojan horse», Wedds says of a work he believes
a lot of people will overlook. They’ll think that the art gallery got it out of an
antique shop.
«I like work that is macro and micro: from a distance it’s one thing, but
if you spend time with it, other things start appearing».
Entering level three of the MCA we are greeted by catastrophe.
In Hoda Afshar’s Aura (2020-23), a kaleidoscopic array of black-andwhite found photographs depict moments from the 2019-20 bushfires,
Black Lives Matter (BLM), US air strikes on Iraq in 2019, and the ongoing
pandemic. There is conflict, tragedy and schism here – but for Afshar,
these events are connected by the most fundamental of things: breath.
26
From the smoke of the bushfires to Eric Garner and BLM’s cry of «I can’t
breathe» to the suffocation of the pandemic.
Afshar did not take the individual photographs, which stretch across the
globe. Instead, she began the work from her home in Melbourne during lock-
down, photographing a portion of other people’s photographs. «Every scene
you see is a tiny part of a much larger picture», she explains. «There are mil-
lions of photographs being recorded online every minute around the world.
Do we need more photographs, or do we just need to meditate on what’s already created?»
That question – of what to look at, or what to show – is a difficult one for
an exhibition with such an all-encompassing title as The National. Rather than
shoehorning artists into an exhibition built around a singular theme, the
MCA’s senior curator Jane Devery wanted artists to maintain their own di-
verse points of reference. Be it in Isabelle Sully’s sound work, which reconsiders the histories of women’s voices in the media through a series of news
bulletins read by Sandra Sully; Allison Chhorn’s immersive video installation,
which places a facsimile of her parents’ vegetable shade house in the gallery,
meditating on memory, migration and simple acts from the everyday; or Rudi
Williams’ chance-driven photographs that feel at once kinetically charged and
completely still.
«I just wanted to broaden the idea of what Australian art is», Devery says.
«I deliberately chose artists who would brush up against that idea of The National».
This is foregrounded at Campbelltown Arts Centre, through the presence
of a giant inverted boat in the gallery’s centre: Isabel Aquilizan and Alfredo
Aquilizan’s Another Country (2010-2023). Working with their five adult chil-
dren – Miguel, Diego, Amihan, Leon and Aniway – and practising under the
collective name Fruitjuice Factori Studio, the artists take a quintessential vessel of travel and use it to suggest the process of home-making.
«We’re from the Phillipines, we have 7,107 islands, so we use the boat as
a signification for travel, journey, dislocation and movement», Alfredo Aquilizan explains. «By inverting it we are thinking about the dawn of architecture,
when someone arrives on an island and the first thing they do is invert their
boat, which becomes their roof».
(https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/apr/01/the-national-4-
major-survey-of-contemporary-australian-art-invites-a-closer-look)
27
Article 5. Portraits of Dogs review – pass the pooper-scooper,
this one’s a stinker
The Guardian, Jonathan Jones
Tue 28 Mar 2023 14.24 BST
The Wallace Collection’s lavish, even epic survey of canine portraiture
down the ages is the kind of exhibition I thought galleries had grown out of:
a sickly cocktail of brittle snobbery, fey «fun» and naked desperation to please.
At least, to please dog lovers, who really do appear to be the target audience.
«Why not pamper your pooch with a gift from our shop»? suggests the website. Why not? Because I’ve never owned a dog and anyway they’re not al-
lowed in our flats.
Obviously, the dog in art is a valid subject, even if it lacks the pedigree
of the cat, which goes back to ancient Egypt. The problem is that Portraits of
Dogs frames the image of the dog in a silly, facetious way, like some pretentious pet food commercial.
For a moment I was fooled. The show starts with a drawing by Leonardo
da Vinci of a dog’s paw seen in detail, from different viewpoints: a superb
example of his scientific eye for nature. Nearby is a life-sized ancient Roman
marble sculpture of two skinny dogs licking each other: the Townley Greyhounds, as they’re known, are so lifelike they could almost be guard-dogs preserved in the ash of Pompeii.
Then it all turns to dogshit. Seriously, bring your aesthetic pooper-
scooper. You walk into an entire room of trite, nauseous, overglossed paintings by the 19th-century animal artist Edwin Landseer. I can see the tempta-
tion to «reassess» Landseer: he wasn’t just a Victorian sentimentalist, but a
product of the Romantic Age, his sympathy for animals mirroring ours today.
Or some such rubbish. But Landseer is awful. His paintings are congested and
cynical. Not even Jeff Koons could ironically reclaim them.
I hoped the Landseer room was an aberration, but there’s more of his
work – much more – throughout the show. So, to love this exhibition, you
need to love him, and own a dog. The sickliest section, called The Royal Dog,
juxtaposes Landseer’s portraits of Queen Victoria’s pets with the monarch’s
own drawings of them. What are we supposed to do – coo and gasp at these
banal little watercolours? They’ll be giving King Charles III a solo show next.
So add fanatical monarchist to dog owner and Landseer lover, and the exhibition’s profiling of its audience gets ever-more specific – which is a shame, be-
cause buried somewhere here is an important truth.
28
Dog portraiture is just as radically varying, in purpose and quality, as the
portrayal of humans. Paintings of dogs can transcend all the pet-pampering
silliness to attain profundity. Lucian Freud’s little portrait of his dog Pluto
achieves that. How wonderful to be a sleeping dog, suggests Freud, what
a mystery is in that furry being.
But it is the 18th-century artist and animal anatomist George Stubbs who
absolutely takes you into the soul of a dog. His 1787 painting Lady Archer’s
Maltese Terrier makes you see the world from the animal’s point of view.
The little fancy pet is rearing up with energy and fear, surrounded by dark,
towering vegetation: you feel its nervous energy and compulsion to yap.
The world for it is vast and nameless.
Yet the exhibition does Stubbs a disservice, putting other dog portraits by
him in a section labelled The Aristocratic Dog. This is like calling his great
rearing portrait of Whistlejacket a «posh horse». Yes, the Liverpoolborn
Stubbs made his living portraying the horses and hounds of the Georgian upper crust, but he always looks past snobbery and cliche to see animals as autonomous beings with their own awareness of the world, different from ours
yet equally valid.
The show’s inability to see the true nature of Stubbs and its insulting im-
plication that he’s a lesser artist than its hero, Landseer, reveals a failure to
engage with animals at all. Isn’t the sentimentally smeared lens of pet owner-
ship actually an oppressive human lack of respect? I may not like dogs, but at
least I know they are different from me. They deserve better than to be dressed
up in a white bonnet with a pipe stuck in their mouth in Landseer’s horrible
1836 painting Comical Dogs.
(https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/mar/28/portraits-of-
dogs-review-wallace-collection-london)
Article 6. Full of Days review – the wonderfully strange artist discovered
in a charity shop haul
The Guardian, Adrian Searle
Mon 27 Mar 2023 15.15 BST
Scenes from a life: the artist in her red beret, a phoenix risen from the
ashes and surrounded by strange planets and indecipherable signs. The artist
at the bottom of the stairs after a fall – the cat watches her while angular abstracts climb the wall and a cup of tea grows cold on the carpet. The artist
29
naked except for a hat. Daughter Jacqui in a wedding veil, and another wearing
fishnets, heels and a corset. The artist, or perhaps her daughter again, in tears.
And here’s Jacqui dressed like her mother, looking ill and lazing on a platform
in a wintry garden with bare trees. She’s wreathed in light. A big-eyed child
holding an unhappy-seeming doll who looks more real than the child.
A smiling vicar called David; a village hunting scene; a hospital ward; a city
beach scene; somewhere in America.
The more you look, the odder Hermione Burton’s paintings are, with their
mix of the fantastical and the observed, with their strange abbreviations and
forced smiles, their mix of the inept and the characterful, their exactitude and
wonkiness, their naivety and knowingness. Large, capitalised signatures loom
large in every one. Burton might be called an outsider artist, and dedicated
herself to painting both happy moments, personal mementoes and uncomfortable memories. After discovering oil paint following open heart surgery in
California, she painted incessantly. Born in 1926, Burton had suffered from
rheumatic heart disease since childhood, and her daughter inherited the same
condition, dying in her 30s. Burton went to the US with her American serviceman husband, got homesick listening to Tom Jones singing Green, Green
Grass of Home and returned, first to her native Aylesbury and then to Bedford,
where she joined the local art club. She was impervious to advice and went
her own way. She married three times, and died in 2007.
In 2017, Andy Holden discovered a trove of Burton’s paintings, scattered
between a number of charity shops in Bedford. They’d fetched up there after
Burton’s house was cleared. Each one was signed Hermione and they had all
been carefully framed. Intrigued by both their intensity and variety, Holden
bought them all. He is still looking for any more that might come to light.
This has led to both an exhibition of the paintings themselves, and a num-
ber of photographs, but also to a film by Holden, Kingdom of the Sick, in
which the late artist is played by Sarah Cracknell of Saint Etienne, who also
provide the incidental music, although it is Holden’s own band, the Grubby
Mitts, who do a version of Tom Jones’s heart-tugging hit.
Dressed in Burton’s characteristic red beret and dress, a motioncaptured
Cracknell speaks direct to camera and walks through Hermione’s painted
world, her commentary taken from Burton’s self-published autobiography.
Holden sees the paintings like stills from a movie, and in The Kingdom of the
Sick the scenes featuring Cracknel are interspersed with interviews by Holden
30
with members of the Bedford Art Club who remember her, her supporters and
friends, including the director of the gallery in Welling borough who gave
Burton her only solo exhibition, and portrait painter James Lynch (whom she
once painted, and who also painted her). Holden, who also sup-plies the film’s
commentary, interviews Lynch in hospital – he died not long afterwards.
A woman from the art club remembers running into Jacqui in a Bedford pub,
where, she discovers, Jacqui is working as an escort.
All this could be mawkish and intrusive, but isn’t. Motion capture gives
Cracknel’s delivery and movements a strange, stilted disjointedness. She’s
like the woman who fell to earth, and it is more than Hermione’s voice that’s
out of sync and out of time. Cracknel is her avatar, moving among and between and through her art and life. Examining this hinterland, and the subjec-
tive experiences of health and illness are as much Holden’s purpose here as
they were Burton’s, whose paintings are a description and expression of oth-
erness, just as her public facade – the beret, the immaculate make-up, both in
her life and in her self-portraits – was a calculated and constructed persona,
a protection and a way of moving through the world.
Old-fashioned printed captions sometimes fill the screen, quoting Vir-
ginia Woolf, Susan Sontag and others on the experience of illness. It is all
done with a deft and unsentimental touch. When we are ill or bereaved, we are
all outsiders. «Illness is the great confessional, a childish outspokenness in
illness; things are said, truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability of
health conceals», wrote Woolf.
Bringing together Hermione Burton’s paintings and her words and the
reminiscences of those who knew her, and pitching them all in relation to the
exigencies of Holden’s own art, he talks about Burton as «a sick body that
painted furiously to leave a record of her life, as only by telling others our
story do we create memories for ourselves». Unlike American artist Jim Shaw,
who has for decades collected and shown art found in thrift stores as a commentary on the American psyche, Holden’s focus is more singular. Momen-
tarily at least, transience is stilled. And without his serendipitous discovery,
Burton and her art, and its singular record of a life, might have disappeared
altogether, her paintings only bought for their frames, the canvases chucked.
(https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/mar/27/hermione-bur-
ton-and-andy-holden-review-gallery-of-everything-london)
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