Pumpkin & Tapestry

A sunny day in London

Oct 18, 2024

Hejsa!

It is the middle of October and on Wednesday it was 22 degrees here. That is not normal! It is disconcerting. But also kind of nice? I’m certainly glad that we had a similar/slightly lower temperature yesterday because I needed to go into London and part of what I was doing is outdoors.

The main reason I was going into London was to visit the Danish embassy to apply for a new passport. I was not surprised to see Danish designer chairs in the passport office. 😁

The embassy is in a pretty fancy part of London (probably most of the embassies are), with both Harrod’s and Harvey Nichols just around the corner. There was no shortage of designer clothes, and cars that cost more than our house, in that area!

Since I was going to be in the Knightsbridge area, I decided to combine the embassy visit with an artist date.

I started with a visit to Kensington Gardens where a large Pumpkin sculpture by Yayoi Kusama is installed by the Round Pond. It is a very big pumpkin! It will only be there until the third of November. Which is a shame because it looks really nice in that setting. In fact, I think the area around the Round Pond could do with some more sculptures.

I also visited the V&A. I realised the other week that I haven’t been to the V&A since 2018! I used to go fairly regularly. I guess being busy with other things, and the small matter of a global pandemic, is what kept me from going…

I knew I wouldn’t have a lot of time to explore at the V&A so I decided to visit two of my favourite objects in the collection. The first stop was the Ardabil carpet (room 42). Made around 1540. It is quite fragile so it is kept in dark display case. It’s difficult to take a good picture of.

The other object, probably my most favouritest thing in the whole V&A is Tapestry with Scenes of A Boar And Bear Hunt, made between 1430 and 1450. In the picture above. It is massive. It’s hard to get a sense of the scale from the picture. There is so much going on in this tapestry, I could easily spend hours just looking at that one object.

My favourite part of the tapestry is this lady. Her expression, her hat(?) and her dress are all fabulous. I can highly recommend a visit to this tapestry if you haven’t seen it yet. It is in the Medieval & Renaissance section, room 10a on floor -1.

Very much inspired to sketch some medieval flowers. 😃

I hope you have a lovely weekend!

x Carina

Some Interesting Things from The Internet

Blankets and Quilts on the Met Museum’s Immaterial podcast. Mainly about the Gee’s Bend quilters.

5 reasons you look bad in photos. YouTube video.

If you also missed out on seeing the aurora borealis the other day, here’s a website that tracks where the aurora may be visible, depending on the cloud/light pollution conditions of course. (UK only, sorry. But you should be able to find something similar for your location.)

And a couple of Substack posts that caught my eye:

Be the Artist-in-Residence of Your World from

It's Good to Be Here