'Being outside London gives us freedom'
Turner: Always Contemporary at the Walker Art Gallery | House of Weaving Songs at British Textile Biennial
An unconventionally-timed Stored Honey this week as I’m away in St Ives, looking out of the window at a view not unlike a Turner painting - fittingly give the subject of this week’s edition. It’s half term and I’m juggling work around spending time with my kids - I’ve been writing this in between walks on the beach and games of 99 Nights in the Forest on Roblox, which seems to sum up modern childhood (nature and screens) at least in my little family.
I’m planning a visit to Tate St Ives and to Barbara Hepworth’s garden, which always makes me want to hide behind one of her sculptures until everyone else has gone home and pretend it’s my own space for a bit.
Between all this, there will be two more emails for paid subscribers this week - my usual curated guide to the month next weekend and, before that, the return of the Stored Honey podcast, which features a longer version of the chat below with National Museums Liverpool’s curator of British art Dr Melissa Gustin. If you would like to receive those as well as regular Meet the Creator features and a monthly curator’s pick of 5 must-see objects in their venue, click below. But please don’t do it through the iOS Substack app as Apple adds extra charges (explained here).
If you do not wish to take out a paid subscription but would like to support Stored Honey with a one-off tip, you can do that via our online tips jar at Ko-Fi.
‘We’ve got sharks’
“We’ve got sharks,” is Dr Melissa Gustin’s response when asked why, of the many, many Turner exhibitions taking place in 2025, visitors should come to see the Walker’s. This year is the 250th anniversary of HMW Turner’s birth, which is a great excuse for every gallery and stately home in the land with at least one of his pieces in their collection to get it out and form an exhibition around it.
What this does highlight is his prolificity - at his death he bequeathed some 550 paintings, around 2,000 watercolours and 35,000 works on paper to the nation. Most are held by Tate Britain. But the challenge is for these shows to be more than a “look at all this beautiful art created by a master” - to convey to today’s visitors how revolutionary, exciting and unexpected it would have been to encounter Turner’s work at the time he was making it.
The Walker Art Gallery’s newly opened Turner: Always Contemporary tackles this by showing it alongside contemporary pieces demonstrating his influence on later generations. The promised sharks are suspended mid-swim in Damien Hirst’s Two Similar Swimming Forms in Endless Motion (1993) - the first time it has been displayed in Liverpool.
In another section, op artist Bridget Riley’s Sea Cloud, large canvas filled with pink, yellow, blue, black and lilac vertical stripes, hang next to a pair of comparatively tiny watercolours of Venice. And on entering the exhibition you are greeted by Jeff Koons’ Gazing Ball (Turner Ancient Rome) (2015) - a hand-painted recreation of a Turner painting, with a blue reflective glass ball placed on a shelf at the centre.
Gustin’s curation is about more than attention-grabbing lists of works. She links them to Turner’s thematically and stylistically. Sea Cloud, influenced by a trip to Egypt, shares a pearly colour palette with the Venetian works, and both artists were interested in the interplay between the different tones.
“Liverpool as a collection has a really special body of work to pull from,” she says.
“We, in many ways, have a freedom being outside London to be a bit more playful, to have a bit more fun, to do something a bit edgier and to bring things together in a more surprising way to think about what it means today.
“Lots of the Turner shows have had contemporary art, but I think that what makes us special is that we are able to put things out of chronological order - to see what happens when you put The Wreck Buoy, our most famous Turner, next to a Damien Hirst painting, next to a Maggi Hambling, next to some sharks in formaldehyde, next to an Ethel Walker...”
Of course none of this would work without a decent number of Turner pieces in the mix - and there are many in this exhibition. Some highlights: The Falls of the Clyde (1840s), showing his ability to capture the ethereal sight of light falling on mist; The Wreck Buoy (painted around 1807 and reworked in 1849) with a white ship’s mast dazzling against the sea’s thrashing waves; and his unfinished Liber Studiorium series of mezzotints created to teach other artists about his landscape painting.
Next to these are works by Monet, Le Sidaner, Lucienne Pissarro, James McNeill Whistler. There are pieces by artists from Liverpool, including war painter Albert Richards, and works of Liverpool, including waterfront oil paintings by John Atkinson Grimshaw. And there are, for once, many by women - including Ethel Walker’s Seascape (c.1925) where the waves seem to crash out of the frame; and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s glacier paintings, showing the effects of pollution and climate change since Turner’s own depictions.
“There are ideas that women artists are sort of followers, they come along after, they’re a little bit safer,” says Gustin.
“But you look at Sheila Fell’s painting of this mining equipment, and it’s almost completely black, and you can see how she is a leading British painter in the ‘50s. You look at Wilhelmina Barns-Graham painting around the same time and they’re so geometric and experimental.
“They’re not safe. They’re not conservative pictures. These are artists who are really serious about painting, about being at the forefront of modern British art, the same way that Turner was when he was alive.”
Turner: Always Contemporary is at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool until Sunday, February 22, 2026.
See your work featured in Stored Honey
If you’re an artist, actor, theatre maker, curator, director or producer, I’d love to hear more about your work. You can submit details of an exhibition, performance or cultural event via this short form or send me an email to tostoredhoney@gmail.com. If you would like to take part in Stored Honey’s regular Meet the Artist feature, please answer the questions in this Q&A If you’re not a fan of forms, hit reply and I’ll send you the questions via email.
Latest arts news
🏴☠️ Family audiences are in for a swashbuckling adventure this Christmas when Peter Pan flies into Port Sunlight’s Gladstone Theatre, with Emmerdale and Hollyoaks’ Darren John Langford as the dastardly Captain Hook from Saturday, December 6 to Wednesday, December 31.
🥋 Karate Kid - The Musical will be touring to the Palace Theatre in Manchester in May 2026 and to the Liverpool Empire in June 2026. Bringing the original, now legendary 1984 film to life on stage, this heart-felt coming of age story is reimagined through movement, music, and raw, energetic storytelling.
Mastermind. Code breaker. Maverick. Arguably one of the most important and inquisitive minds of the twentieth century. Alan Turing is famed for cracking the Enigma code at Bletchley Park, effectively securing victory for the Allied forces in WWII. His story is being told in a new production of Hugh Whitemore’s Breaking the Code at HOME in Manchester.
Closing this week
This week is the last chance to catch the British Textile Biennial before it closes on Sunday. You can read my main feature on the festival here, but I was keen to find out more about House of Weaving Songs by Bristol-based The Dhaqan Collective, which was one of the very last art works I saw in what was a packed media day.
Led by Ayan Cilmi and Fozia Ismail, The Dhaqan Collective is a feminist art collective of Somali women, centring the experiences of womxn and elders. Inspired by the Somali nomadic Aqal, the House of Weaving Songs is a domed steel structure decorated with woven tapestries that play archival recordings of Somali women’s weaving songs and a soundscape of narratives when you touch them.
Ismail, who moved to Britain from Somalia as a child in the 1980s, says: “It was a chance to understand the interior lives of these women that people kind of ignore. They’re in the background.
“We were really interested in what that movement was like for them. I came as a refugee and I remember moving from Kuwait to here, but you adjust quite quickly as a child. But as an adult woman, having to rebuild your house... we were really interested in, in hearing about that.”
The Dhaqan Collective ran workshops for Somali elders, and as the women wove together they sang work-songs on subjects like how to build a home, how to look after the trees around you and the importance of marrying a good man.
Cilmi says: “It was lovely seeing them piece bits together. Different people would remember different parts or lyrics of the song, and then you’d eventually kind of have this complete piece at the end of it. That’s a part of the process of weaving, is that it just allows you to kind of relax and unlocks various memories.
“Growing up we’ve been bombarded with really negative stereotypes and forms of representation of Somali people. Learning about Somali culture in these various ways, is building our kind of sense of self, block by block, and creating a greater understanding of who we are.”
House of Weaving Songs is at Blakey Moor in Blackburn until Sunday, November 2.
In case you missed it
One for all the family
The Enormous Crocodile is weaving his way through the jungle in search of delicious little fingers and squidgy podgy knees at Lowry, Salford, this Christmas. Only the other jungle creatures can foil his secret plans and clever tricks, but they’re going to have to find a large amount of courage to stop this greedy brute. Developed and directed by Emily Lim, it features a menagerie of puppet and lots of songs. Wednesday, December 10 to Sunday, January 4.
Thank you for reading the 152nd edition of Stored Honey. If you enjoyed what you read then please hit the ❤️ button as it helps to get it shown more widely.
I’m off now to get some sea air. In the meantime, you can submit details of an exhibition, performance or cultural event via this short form or send me an email to tostoredhoney@gmail.com.
Have a great week,
Laura
P.S. Art thieves strike at one of Liverpool’s most famous buildings
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