CREATIVE BOOST

I have decided rashly that I will aim to do a newsletter every three weeks, two weeks is too much and once a month is not enough. I get so excited about good stuff, the pear recipe, Cathie Pilkington’s show at the Freud Museum and Riot Girls. The love needs to be spread. Plus choreographer Sharon Eyal as a master conjuror. The only way to get through this now cold autumn is to delve into delicious creative stuff, politics and world confusion are off the menu.

The Freud Museum has always been a place I return to. I was lucky enough to do a performance there. Above is me as a cleaning lady, cleaning The Freud Museum with my body. The performance looked at the relationship between working and pleasure, earning a living and private desires. I erased smudges whilst adding the variegated traces of my body in motion. Not dissimilar to the gardening I do now. (More later)

29 October 2025 to 1 March 2026

£14.50 admission

I was intrigued to see how one of my hero artists - Cathie Pilkington - would infiltrate the Freud Museum with her objects that have such presence. Her way into this brusquely male freudian territory was to focus on Freud’s housekeeper Paula Fichtl who packed all his antiquities up and then unpacked them with care and attention when they arrived in London.

Cathie has inserted her peculiar powerful objects connecting with a house so full of memories. There is a humour too. As a sculptor and an assembler Cathie’s preoccupation with class, taste, gender, and who has an aesthetic which startles and seduces - creating a poetic of housework, I love.

20 September 2025 - 18 January 2026

£23.00 admission

School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012)

If you want bright colours with serious tales and a thought provoking narrative, this is the show for you. It bowled me over with its scale and its deep excavation of how Marshall defines his world.

I crashed a talk with the curator Mark Godfrey. He described the above as an everyday scene of a laid back hairdresser. Marshall complicates matters with a Holbein-style anamorphosis (like the skull in The Ambassadors at the National Gallery).

Marshall’s Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty in yellow is scrutinised by an intrigued toddler.

As Godfrey noted:

“In The Ambassadors, Holbein was thinking about how their lives were haunted by death… Kerry uses that idea to think about how white standards of beauty might intrude upon the beauty salon.”

Every painting deserves time. Dense, tender, shadowed, and layered.

Some FREE viewing now. You can see inspiring art within walking distance of Bond St tube. On some Saturdays, in the weekend shuffle, my husband Michael (aka Mike Smith Studio) and I wander through shows. Michael looks at detail; I look at the whole. We generally agree.

Our top favourite in this tour in order were:

November 6—December 20, 2025

Here are 44 of Diana Arbus’s photographs where she was invited into people’s homes and intimate space where the subject appears safe in those surroundings. With her courage and intuition she always created an exceptional dialogue with those she photographs, and in some way she captures a true version of themselves.

November 6 - January 17 2026

I love that Rachel Rose says:

“I have doubts about being an artist… as well as about what art means in the world.”

I like too that her videos can be epic, gravity defying and complex and then these small paintings can be both simple in medium and yet profound in viewing. They have atmosphere and are charged as if landscape has meaning and can tell a story.

November 14 - December 20 2025

As is, and brilliant.

Also worth seeing:
• Ed Ruscha at Gagosian Davies Street — exquisite words on canvas.
• Tom Sachs at Thaddaeus Ropac — for his Nike-trainer cultists.

Michael examining stretchers at Thaddaeus Ropac of Eva Helene Pade

Entertainment and to remember our creative soul on dark nights

Do you need a boost? Time to think about creative process and inspiration. I have been chatting with creatives for the last year, enjoying their insights into how to make a creative life work.

Instagram Live
Sunday 26 November 2025 — 6pm GMT

A multi-award-winning composer for film, TV and games, Nainita will talk about her creative process, storytelling through sound, genres, and how music drives character and plot.

We’ll discuss her Netflix scores too: 14 Peaks and The Deepest Breath. Emotive musical precision.

Join via @jemimaburrill at 6pm flagged LIVE on instagram stories.

BBC i-player - 4 star Guardian review

This made me so happy and cry — the best combination.
Women singing about the menopause (the song Red is still looping in my brain). Wainwright writes drama brilliantly: twists, flawed characters, believable darkness.

I am looking for a band to join. I just need to choose an instrument.

Perfect November watching.

Food as love not just fuel

This is another classic from my Mum who made poached pears leaving the skins on and cooking them with no care or attention in whatever red wine happened to be around rancid or not, with a couple of cloves. They were one of her best puddings.

Wash and gently peel your pears. In a saucepan add:

• ginger wine (or any decent wine)

• a splash of brandy

• a spoon of brown sugar

• half a lemon, juiced (then throw the lemon in)

• about six cloves

Boil 15 minutes (longer if unripe).
Serve with crème fraîche.

My eldest eats these pears whole, like a seal eating fish.

I was rereading French Cooking by Elizabeth David her tone makes me chuckle, particularly at her brilliant attitude to wine in the kitchen and Gertrude Stein’s cook. I dream of a larder stuffed with little bottles of Grand Marnier and Framboise, and port.

This isn’t for now but for the future: Sharon Eyal will be back. Get a ticket. She will blast a hole in your perception.

Sadler’s Wells

I hadn’t heard of Sharon Eyal. My youngest and I both spotted her in the Guardian and decided to go. We arrived and immediately ran into someone raving about Killer Pig — too bleak even for YouTube. We felt late to the party.

Into the Hairy was dark, delicate, vigilant, expansive, fluttering, proud. Tim Burton meets the Addams Family meets Frankenstein with a flourish of 80s Madonna. Costumes by Maria Grazia Chiuri (Dior Couture), soundtrack by Koreless.

Eyal says:

“The power of unison is the power of loneliness.”

There is nothing like bodies on stage when you can feel the sweat.

Filling your mind in mundane moments

When I started gardening for others I worried about loneliness — I like a team. Podcasts and audiobooks have kept me company.

A wonderful companion to digging and pruning. Katherine May explores seasonal ebbing, fallow periods, and slow reforming. The science of leaves falling, dormice doubling their weight, Northern Lights while heavily pregnant, a bipolar convert to cold-water swimming in Denmark, fires on Whitstable Beach…

Mostly it comforts because it reflects the active acceptance of sadness.

3 October 2023 to 7 January 2024

One of my favourite art objects I own: Sophie Calle postcards, now ink-splattered from living on my drawing desk.

Her attitude to following people, to asking question, to creating poignant rituals like asking the same number of people as her age to dinner each Birthday, tickles me.

At the Picasso Museum she takes over entirely; Picasso appears only through her lens. Guards describe an absent painting (their words displayed). Auctioneers value her home; 500 objects appear in the gallery, including a giraffe’s head. She wanted her bedroom in the gallery; she got an office instead. She may be there.

I may need to jump on a Eurostar.

I am going to leave you with a robin. In each garden I tend there is a robin that keeps me company, feasting on the worms I turn. I love what Katherine May writes in Wintering:

“A robin sings in winter because it can, and it wants the world – or at least the female robins – to know it. But he is also practising for happy times.”

Jemima / MW