CARO JOWETT

I was delighted and honoured when my friend Pedro Paricio ​invited me to write the catalogue essay for Dreams, his fourth exhibition with Bond Street's Halcyon Gallery. The essay is reproduced here along with some of his stunning, though-provoking art. Dreams runs until September 25, 2016

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Art is not about being famous. Art is about freedom, human freedom... but to find freedom for others you must fir...

Photograph © Francesco Guidicini

Kindness is dead. She was knifed, no axed, no shot by her boyfriend, a lover, a man in a red car that was not a silver Pajero and the five ladies who were her colleagues in the hair saloon (sic) where she was the best (and cheapest) braid plaiter in Harare can’t get enough of her death. They weave it in and out of their day, around their customers, a blind beggar and his seeing-eye boy – both...

I almost didn’t do this course, which would have been a shame as I’ve learned so much.

Back in October I had the first draft of a novel I knew wasn’t working, but didn’t know how to fix. I was starting to avoid it when a Curtis Brown newsletter pinged in advertising a three-month course tutored by Erin Kelly (below), a writer of psychological thrillers with tightly-controlled, slowly unfurling plots. Perfect timing, then.

I appl...

If you know Tim Hunkin from his C4 show The Secret Life Of Machines or his books, Almost Everything There Is To Know and Hunkin's Experiements, then you probably won't be surprised to learn about his passion for automata. If you've spent any time at all in Southwold then you definitely won't. Hunkin's Under The Pier Show arcade has been issuing tokens to holidaymakers for over fifteen years.

Hunkin, an engineer...

I saw an angel yesterday. He was perched atop a pailing outside Waterstone's St Albans, in a blue and green hand-knitted gown, with a pink knitted face and golden hand-knitted wings. Tied around his little knitted neck with silver and white wool was a laminated message which read on one side, "YOU CAN DO IT!" and on the other, "Please take me, I'm free" along with #xmasangels and @homewoodurc. 

What could I do?...

I’ve just come back from a whistlestop tour of the Baltic region. Eight days of exploring and eating in Copenhagen, Tallinn, Riga and Stockholm. Despite a diet of mainly blood sausage and chips I’ve lost three pounds. My feet ache from walking miles in the wrong shoes and my joints are stiff, but the weather was more glorious than we could have hoped for.

Copenhagen was first. All elegant pastel blues and pinks and white edged...

Here's something to get out of bed for: Gemma Selzer's early morning writing Write & Shine workshops. A gentle start to your writerly day or a couple of hours of creativity before the working world sweeps you away.

It's the kind of thing New York does all the time, but London's been a bit shuffley and slow up about it. Until now.

Gemma's a writer and performance artist who loves mornings, which is more than I c...

Football and I aren't really friends. I don't hate it, I've just never really got it: I'd rather be doing other things. So until a week ago, I'd never been inside a football stadium. Then I got to go on a tour of Arsenal's Emirates Stadium and I very nearly became a fan. 

Emirates Stadium at dusk. Credit: Ed g2s

The place is a massive monument to loyalty and sport. The pride is palpable, everywhere you turn is a nugget of...