Since the end of 2022, I’ve been part of this thing called Hard Art, a collective working on cultural responses to all the things we’re facing right now, but particularly various climate-related ugh-nesses.

Over the last year, as a kind of ice-breaker, people have made blind contour line portraits in pairs and then amazing artist/musician Ian Bruce has coloured lots of them in.

Now, as a fundraiser for the collective, 100 of them have been collected in an exhibition, “Drawn Without Looking” which is on in London for the next few days (through to Saturday 1st June) at the Paul Stolper Gallery in Museum Street. Astonishingly, the one of me (by Love Ssega !) is still, as yet, unsold – get your credit cards out, people!

They’ve also been collected into a book which has been released on metalabel – there’s other Hard Art stuff on the metalabel page too, so have a dig around.

Bonus Link: in a similar vein, older readers might remember the blind contour self-portraits I did, one a day, in February 2020

Citations galore needed but…

Keir Starmer is quoted as saying there’s an “anti-politics mood” at the moment (as we move towards a General Election in the UK).

I don’t believe there’s an anti-politics mood, but I understand why professional politicians see it like that, because they believe that politics is only what politicians and activists do.

Politics is too important to leave to politicians in the same way that your health is too important to leave to doctors, the education of your children is too important to leave to teachers and your relationships are too important to leave to online social networks.

I think that we all need to take responsibility for actively participating in those things that have been professionalised out of our communal experience, not because we’re anti-expert (some of my best friends… etc) but because professionalised expertise only gets us so far and over a (shockingly short) period of time it reduces our ability to care for ourselves and others.