That was Prince Peter Kropotkin, writing his Memoirs of a Revolutionist in the 1890s. Things have changed a bit since then as Moscow feels the impact of new money that has flowed in following the end of the Soviet Union, coupled with the ‘hyper-mayoral’ powers of Mayor Yury Luzhkov who appears able to command or condemn buildings in a way BoJo could only envy.

Last week in a talk at Pushkin House, centre of all things Russian in London, Clementine Cecil spoke about the perfect architectural storm being experienced by Moscow and other Russian cities. Cecil, sometime Times correspondent in Moscow, helped to set up the Moscow Architecture Preservation Society (MAPS) in 2004 following demolition of the Hotel Moskva (pictured above), famous as the image on the Stolichnaya Vodka label. The hotel has now been replaced by a not-very-accurate ‘replica’.

Of course, all great cities are in a constant state of architectural flux; they build and demolish, make mistakes, squabble and recriminate, try again. But current developments in Moscow do often seem to involve the demolition of buildings which express the city’s history and culture in distinctive ways, only for them to be replaced by copies that show little respect for the original. Luzhkov has said he believes replicas are as good as, or better than, originals.

Cecil’s talk presented the struggle to save at least part of Moscow’s historic fabric through the lives of several “heroes of Russian conservation”. Prominent amongst these campaigners was David Sarkisyan, Director of Moscow Shchusev State Architecture Museum, who died aged 62 just weeks ago.

Sarkisyan, previously a pharmacologist and film director, became Director of the Shchusev Museum on 1st January 2000 and immediately plunged what had been a rather sedate institution into a whirlwind of exhibitions and conservation campaigns. An Armenian who had spent most of his life in Russia Sarkisyan was a classic insider/outsider and a compulsive communicator - it’s probably no accident that a picture of him amongst the books and artifacts in his extraordinary office shows him clutching a mobile phone. These characteristics and his flair for eye-catching artistic gestures - he wore a red boiler suit to the opening of Tate Modern’s Constructivist exhibition as his own personal homage to Constructivist style - helped Sarksiyan bring together anyone, Russian or non-Russian, with an interest in protecting the country’s heritage.

Cecil pointed out the fact that conservation in Russia is often seen as a “dissident activity” by those in power. This is a thread that links Sarkisyan’s tussles with property developers and Moscow’s city authorities to figures like Pyotr Baranovsky, an architect who was sent to Siberia for three years in the 1930s for protesting against the demolition of Kazan Cathedral in Red Square. Interestingly Kazan Cathedral was rebuilt in the 1990s following measurements taken by Baranovsky and could be seen as one of Moscow’s more successful ‘replicas’.

Opposition from some official quarters has encouraged MAPS to come up with creative protest strategies - I was taken with a photo of a demonstration of snowmen, each with his own placard. As Cecil says - “You can’t arrest a snowman.”

A rather sad postscript to Sarkisyan’s life demonstrates the passions roused by the struggle over what sort of architectural face Moscow presents to the world. Despite being presented with a petition by the Minister of Culture requesting that Sarkisyan be buried in the city’s Armenian cemetery Luzkhov refused permission. It seems Sarkisyan had crossed swords once too often with the Mayor to be permitted to rest in peace in Moscow.

Pushkin House has a regular lecture programme and a talk about St Petersburg’s architecture by Anton Glikin will take place at 7.30pm on 17 March 2010.

Image: Hotel Moskva 1940s © Centre for Historical Urban Studies, Moscow.

“We get wonderful music and singing to accompany the art every Sunday,” says Jamie.

Sited in an old warehouse on a Peckham industrial estate the Hannah Barry gallery is main base for 25-year-old Hannah, an art entrepreneur who must harbour considerable reserves of energy and determination in her slight frame. Since organising her first exhibition in Peckham in 2006 she has built up a group of more than 20 young artists who seem to work in every kind of medium from oil paint to MDF.

Jamie leads me into the soaring gallery space – “acres of space for a fraction of the price you’d pay in the West End” – to take a look at the current exhibition of work by Viktor Timofeev. Timofeev is one of those international mavericks whose CV inspires exhaustion in more plodding personalities. Born in Riga, Latvia, he studied in New York and now lives and works in Berlin.

Timofeev’s exhibition at Hannah Barry takes its title – LOCAL_AREA_NETWORKS(s) – from a term “describing a cluster of connected computer nodes” and is “influenced by progressive architecture, utopian community and skateboarding ideology”. Being sedate – OK lazy – I’m not sure I’m going to get the skateboarding vibe.

One of the things Timofeev does is play with perspective and pattern. Using very simple elements like crosses or Y and V shapes – the fork in the road or tree branch – he creates the kind of patterns which usually form a backdrop to our lives but sometimes spring out and more or less crack us over the head.

Strolling along Timofeev’s pattern wall we pass from tyre tracks to a wire link fence, or perhaps a pool of water shattered by a stone, to a herd of black crosses gathered round a white void. Within one step we seem to have gone from the pattern being a mere accessory to a total explanation of a scene – to me at least those crosses and the void are shorthand for death and a whole variety of complicated funeral scenes and rituals.

Timofeev’s patterns grow into landscapes, provisional looking collections of skips, metal girders and Portakabins often trapped in and held together by complicated webs of rope that have no beginning and no end. In one image, Trebucht_Smke, a collection of jazzy beach umbrellas blooms near a slab of overgrown concrete – St Tropez meets Detroit.

My favourite picture and Jamie’s too goes by the cryptic title LPZG_84 (see above). Our reaction to the teetering arch of Portakabins painted with a rainbow is a nice illustration of the diverse ways in which art ‘gets’ people. Jamie points out how the rainbow’s “golden triangle” draws the eye to the cabin in the foreground, with its interior walls looking as though they’ve been carefully wallpapered. For some strange reason the stacked up cabins remind me of the notorious Victory Arch in Baghdad that was modelled on Saddam Hussein’s forearms. It’s a picture of a place flattened, trying to rebuild itself and not quite sure which dreams to make solid.

Having taken the Peckham Pavilion to the Venice Biennale last year Hannah is still fizzing with ideas. London, she thinks, “definitely has space for a major new gallery”. This spring she will show work from a selection of New York artists whilst working on a plan to open a gallery in NY with the aim of examining “how the US sees Europe and how Europe sees the US”. In this post 9/11 world that sounds like a project with interesting artistic and political ramifications.

Image: LPZG_84, acrylic on canvas © Viktor Timofeev

Spanning 150 years and dozens of different cultures Where Three Dreams Cross, the Whitechapel Gallery’s exhibition of photographs from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, is necessarily ambitious in its scope and variety. For outsiders like me who perhaps tend to see this whole region as a series of dramatic set-pieces – floods, political assassinations, Bollywood films – it doesn’t so much overturn stereotypes as set them in a wider context and show their evolution.

One of my favourite books is Fernand Braudel’s doorstopper about the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century. Braudel is very good on what he calls la longue durée - slow, gradual changes in culture and climate. He contrasts these with ‘sudden spike’ events like battles and the death of political leaders which happen much more quickly.

In a way this huge exhibition is a pictorial version of Braudel’s historical theory. There are the ‘spikes’, the pictures of political events and major building projects like Kulwant Roy’s photo of the Bhakra Nangal Dam catching the last rays of light at sunset. Then there are the pictures of family life, religious festivals and work in shops and fields – things that do change but often in slower, more subtle ways.

Nony Singh who took the photo (above) of her sister Guddi in 1962 wrote notes about her pictures which seem to reflect her sense of the changes taking place in India not long after it gained independence from British rule. Commenting on a picture of another sister, Rajman, with a shawl looped over her head she writes: “I asked her to pose like this for me. I have always liked the combination of a kind of rural headgear on a city face – yet innocent.”

Sometimes it’s tempting to make a direct connection between the oldest photos and the present day – it’s hard not to see the nineteenth century Nawab of Rewah with his jewels and ever-so-slightly winsome expression as the godfather of today’s Bollywood heroes.

Colour is one of the great pleasures of this exhibition. Some of the early silver gelatine and black and white prints have been hand painted so they look like a combination of photo and miniature painting, the time lines of the brush and the camera exposure meeting and mingling so it’s hard to tell where one stops and the other begins.

A more contemporary use of colour is seen in The Stretched Canvas, a collaboration between Arif Mahmood and Shaukat Mahmood. In this series of photos taken in 2008 to 2009 Arif took the pictures and Shaukat painted them. A view of a meat and vegetable market in Karachi is anchored by three main blocks of colour, a strip of sky overhead, a banner stretched across the street and a mound of bananas in the foreground. The picture has a powerful push-pull factor - the bananas draw you towards it while a bird swooping down the street, its wings seeming almost to touch the buildings on either side, makes you want to duck.

Where Three Dreams Cross runs until 11th April. Try to allow plenty of viewing and perhaps cafe break time as there are hundreds of photos to see. If, like me, you have a slightly nerdy interest in archives you may find yourself getting very curious about ones I’d never heard of like the Drik photo library founded in Dhaka in 1989.
Image: My sister Guddi posing as Scarlett O’Hare 1962 © Nony Singh

Organised as a series of rooms rather like the different lobes of a person’s brain the exhibition is billed as ‘Eight Rooms Nine Lives’. Each room concentrates on a single individual with the exception of one devoted to the lives of identical twins Charlotte and Emily Hinch. But the exhibition could just as easily be called Eight Rooms 108 Lives, given the sheer variety of what a life can be.

The idea of multiple identities and personalities takes startling form in the rooms occupied by actress Fiona Shaw and photographer Claude Cahun. Watching Shaw inhabit a series of characters from T S Eliot’s poem The Waste Land is an uncanny experience. She changes from one personality to another in a single breath or a turn of the head – transfixed by her presence I also felt as though I were trying to see through or round her, trying to work out where all the ‘others’ were coming from.

Born Lucie Schwob in fin-de-siècle France Claude Cahun emerged around 1914. Together with her lover Suzanne Malherbe (aka Marcel Moore) she created what could be called a series of anti-self portraits. Using masks and mirrors and photomontage Cahun imagines her identical twin and changes from blonde boy (see above) to Balkan peasant girl.

When the Nazis occupied Jersey, Cahun’s home from 1937 until her death in 1954, Cahun and Moore came up with yet another identity for the purpose of supporting the resistance. Their demoralised German “soldier without a name” wrote grumbling, disgruntled letters that Cahun and Moore distributed round the island.

For all Shaw and Cahun’s passion and showmanship the most emotional part of this exhibition relates to scientific explorations of identity. Perhaps this isn’t surprising - we’re fascinated by the idea that science could somehow pin down aspects of our identity yet rebellious at the constraints implied by such possibilities.

The star of the scientific show is Alec Jeffreys, discoverer of DNA fingerprinting and critic of Britain’s national DNA database, the largest per capita in the world. Jeffreys’ room seethes with the successes and controversies of DNA profiling, from the conviction of murderers to a blog written by British National Party leader Nick Griffin, incensed that a genetic study had linked a group of Yorkshire men to people in West Africa via similarities in their DNA.

Now I know Griffin is an identity obsessive par excellence – it’s one way of describing him – but most of us do attach symbolic importance to our identity and those of other people. One of Jeffreys’ more unusual projects involved taking DNA from Joseph Mengele’s bones to prove he really had died in Brazil in 1979. There’s a photo of Jeffreys smiling and holding a test tube sample of Mengele’s DNA – the torturer finally vanquished and reduced to a lab specimen.

8 Rooms 9 Lives runs until 6 April 2010. Entry is free.

Image: Claude Cahun 1928 © Jersey Heritage Collections

The series is A History of the World in 100 Objects, the aim being to study world history through the medium of 100 objects from the British Museum, including the bust of Ramesses II pictured above. According to the BM the Ramesses sculpture is “a master-class in how to present the image of a political leader” – Brown and Cameron take note in this election year.

As it’s probably possible to spend a whole year in the BM and still not see the entire collection I thought this would be a good excuse to pick out five of my favourites.

The John Addis Islamic Gallery is tucked away by the BM’s back entrance in Montague Place and is often a good place to escape the crowds that can gather round the Greek marbles and Egyptian mummies. Placed rather casually at the bottom of a short flight of steps leading down into the gallery is a marble jar stand made in twelfth century Egypt. It isn’t in a display case and I discovered it by almost tripping over it.

If you haven’t fallen over get down on your knees anyway and have a look at the stand’s side which is decorated with engraved riders and lions. I must admit its colour isn’t so wonderful – it’s made of that marble the colour of chewed chewing gum. But it has great functional elegance – apparently unglazed pots were placed on the stand and water dripped into a projecting trough.

To me this pot stand sums up the Islamic world’s genius for handling water. It’s a miniature, homely version of all those glorious gardens with their rills and fountains.

Sticking with an Egyptian Islamic theme but moving on to the museum’s Sainsbury African galleries I’d recommend ‘Knowledge is sweeter than honey’, a wooden lattice screen made by a contemporary artist, Susan Hefuna. Hefuna is of Egyptian-German background and she has entwined the quotation about knowledge, written in Arabic script, through the screen’s honeycomb pattern. It’s a real trick of the eye, magician’s piece as the lettering comes and goes like a desert mirage – visible from a distance it disappears as you close in to examine the screen.

Just around the corner from the shadows cast by Hefuna’s screen is a bronze head of a queen mother from the kingdom of Benin in West Africa, made in the sixteenth century. For sheer poise and beauty this has to be one of the BM’s star possessions. Standing in the spotlights with her serene expression and tall conical head-dress this 500 year old monarch turns our modern ideas of catwalk glamour into ashes.

On the subject of glamour I’m afraid my favourites list has to include something gold and the next object partly ticks that box. Consisting of five gold, three cornelian and three lapis lazuli beads the Aigina bracelet is one small part of the Aigina treasure, a collection of ancient Greek jewellery the BM bought from a London sponge-dealer in 1892.

What’s novel about the Aigina bracelet is that each bead is moulded in the shape of a right hand cupping a woman’s breast. As the bracelet dates back to around 1,500 BC and gold is soft the golden breasts have worn worst, one in particular is dented and deflated. I suspect this may slightly disappoint men in search of the ultimate breast but make the bracelet more endearing to women. From the look of it that dented breast has had a few experiences, including pregnancy and childbirth.

The Aigina bracelet can be found in gallery 12, just to the left of the BM’s main entrance.

My final favourite is secreted away in the Sir Joseph Hotung Gallery which contains more crockery than an IKEA warehouse. Exhibit number 306 is a small, silver rimmed bowl made at the time of the Song dynasty (11th to 13th century). Its black and brown glaze makes it look like tortoiseshell and it would fit easily in the palm of your hand. To honour its elegance it would almost be worth giving up builder’s tea in favour of something delicate and flowery.

Image: Statue of Ramesses II, 1250 BC, Egypt © The Trustees of the British Museum

Clare Twomey made the china clay flowers especially for this exhibition. Some are displayed in a cabinet, others have escaped and are growing along the room’s mantelpiece and skirting boards, anywhere they suspect may yield shelter and dampness. A few of the ‘wild’ flowers have been crushed, they are turning into dust and seeping into the RA’s cracks and crevices.

Like so much to do with climate change these flowers seem full of threats and possibilities we can’t yet understand or imagine. Crushed and apparently destroyed they represent the damage we inflict on nature but as they blossom all around the room they also take on a sinister, Day of the Triffids aura. If we do boil ourselves into extinction - as Mona Hatoum’s hot red neon map of the world suggests - some sort of vegetation will probably be the first to recover from the catastrophe.The flowers will have the last laughNature’s capacity to adapt and endure is the theme of David Nash’s four Ash Dome drawings. Nash’s Dome has its roots – literally – back in 1977 when he planted a ring of ash saplings in a Welsh valley. Over the years Nash has pruned and trained the trees and recorded their development in drawings he describes as the trees’ “fruit”. These four drawings are seasonal and show the trees’ transformation from a green summery dome, fizzing with pollen and sunlight to a gathering of bare, black trunks in the winter which reminded me of the witches’ song in Macbeth.

Roughly speaking the art works in this exhibition divide between those which record the environment around us – what looks like a block of gold leaf is an Edward Burtynsky photo of an oil sands processing plant in Canada – and those which take an idea or object and then imagine its environmental dimension.

French artist Sophie Calle took her late mother’s diamond ring and pearl necklace and buried them in an Arctic glacier. Her grandfather, fleeing the Nazis during the Second World War, had exchanged a house for the ring. As she photographs and writes about this latest chapter in the destiny of her mother’s inheritance Calle wonders if “in thousands of years, specialists in glaciology will find her ring and discuss endlessly this flash of diamond in Inuit culture. Or if a treasure hunter or beachcomber will discover it and exchange it for a house in the mountains of Grenoble”.

Calle’s work appeals because it tells a story and because it’s about equivalences – what equals what – and how these calculations change according to circumstances. In the upheaval of war a ring for a house might seem like a reasonable deal. If climate change really does transform the world portable wealth – rings on the fingers, knowledge in the head – may prove to be the most valuable asset of all.

Earth continues at the Royal Academy of Arts, 6 Burlington Gardens, London W1S until 31 January 2010.

Image: Mona Hatoum, Hot Spot 2006   David Roberts Collection, London

Gordine was a creator on all fronts, not only with clay and bronze but with the materials of her own life. Her prosperous Russian Jewish family was fragmented by the 1917 revolution and following civil war. She left for Paris, part of the twentieth century’s first wave of refugees. Like so many driven into exile Gordine used the experience as a way to re-invent herself.

With a shrewd understanding of PR Gordine presented herself as a romantic, ‘exotic’ White Russian exile. Determined to succeed as a sculptor she seems to have thrown herself into the art world and deliberately cast aside any ties to her remaining family. By the early 1930s she was living in Singapore and working on a series of sculptures commissioned by the British authorities for the city’s new Municipal Buildings. Interviewed by the Straits Times newspaper Gordine said vaguely that the “Bolshevik scourge” had scattered her family all over the world although it’s quite likely she was aware that her brother Leopold was living quietly in London.

The creation of Dorich House was made possible by Gordine’s second marriage to Richard Hare, a British aristocrat who had the money and the devotion to his wife’s vision of herself and what she could be to bring the whole project to fruition. Some places embody the personalities of those who created them and Dorich House – the name an amalgamation of Dora and Richard – does this to perfection. It’s a red brick building with the soaring dimensions of a cathedral or medieval fortress. The tall, narrow windows like arrow-slits on the ground and first floors emphasise its defensive aura. This part of the house was used as a gallery and studio and Gordine designed the windows to let in light but limit the view, ensuring the focus was turned inward towards her sculptures.

As soon as you enter Dorich House you are surrounded not only by Gordine’s sculptures but by her taste in interior decoration and fastidious attention to detail. The polished dark-wood floors seem to act as extra form of illumination, reflecting rays of light onto sculpted heads and torsos.

One of the pleasures of Dorich House is being able to see sculptures in a non-museum setting, up close, free from display cases and with 360 degree access. Gordine worked a lot with bronze and here it’s possible to see the many different finishes she coaxed from the material, from a smooth conker-brown shine to a much rougher speckled green that has an almost sponge-like texture.

I think Gordine does a particularly good female figure, robust and curvaceous with powerful thighs and a sultry, nipped-in waist. The sway of their hips and arms show how much she was influenced by the sculpture she saw when she lived in south-east Asia.

The top floor of Dorich House consists of the flat where Gordine and Hare lived together for 30 years until his death in 1966. Hare’s presence is strongest in this part of the house – he was a professor of Russian literature and one wall displays his collection of icons, including a Virgin of Kazan gazing out from behind a jewelled silver cover. There is a roof terrace where visitors can go to look out on Richmond Park and Wimbledon Common.

The three floors of Dorich House are linked by a rather steep wooden staircase with a neat recessed banister rail, another example of Gordine’s flair for design. A photograph of her standing on the stairs seems to sum up her approach to life and art. Impeccably dressed with her hair in a chignon and a kiss-curl coiled on each cheek she looks utterly in command of the story she is telling.

Dorich House has open days once a month. The next two open days are on 29 January and 26 February 2010 from 11am to 5pm. Admission is £4. If you’re lucky you may meet the curator, Brenda Martin, who knows masses about Gordine and the house. She collaborated with Jonathan Black to produce a book, Dora Gordine: Sculptor, Artist, Designer.

Photo of Dorich House interior by Brenda Martin

Watching the candle flames flicker and the wax drip it feels rather as though you’ve come across a tree which is still standing in some forest clearing - an essence of all Christmas trees that will endure from year to year.

In reality I’m sure when the Victorians did this sort of thing a lot of the time the candles either failed to light or burnt down the tree, the house and several visiting relatives. I did hear one gloomy woman muttering, “That tree must be getting drier each day they light those candles, it could go up like a torch any minute.”

Still, it’s always nice to dream of the perfect Christmas and in icy-cold, snow-sprinkled London this as good a place as any to do so. Tree lighting up time is 4pm and the final flare up will be on Wednesday 23 December.

I see I’ve mentioned the pot word already and while I appreciate the frustration of some ceramicists at being seen as the pot people it is the beauty and utility of vessels – vases, urns, jugs etc that initially drew me to ceramics. Huge as it is the V&A collection has plenty for non-pot people too, from tiny figurines to a colossal tile-covered stove which reminded me of a character from a nineteenth century Russian novel. Chronologically the exhibits start from around 5,000BC and run right through to the work of contemporary ceramicists.

As good a place to start as any is at the exhibition’s navel, that is the circular dome section which splits the linear gallery into two. This is given over to Material Forces, a collection of work commissioned to mark the opening of the ceramics gallery in September this year. The signature installation is Signs and Wonders by Edmund de Waal, a flock of all-white vessels that he sees as ‘shadows’ or ‘essences’ of the pieces in the V&A collection that have particularly inspired him. All these ghostly vessels are displayed on a circular shelf, just below the dome’s cornice. It’s impossible to see the whole exhibit at once, you have to content yourself with fragments, rather like glimpsing the outline of a city on the horizon on a snowy day.

For dedicated pot-gazers this gallery offers a whole lifetime of leisure opportunity. On this visit I spent a long time contemplating a water sprinkler made in twelfth century Korea. With its pale green glaze and black inlaid decoration of ducks and a willow tree its charm is only accentuated by the fact that the spout on its long neck looks ever so slightly wonky. It was used to scatter water during Buddhist temple services and made me think of a friend’s interesting theory that we ceased to treasure water when we began to carry it in utilitarian, mass-produced containers. Actually I think we began to treat water in a more cavalier fashion in places like Britain when people (women) stopped having to lug it home from ponds and wells.

In the midst of all this beauty it’s sad that ceramics degree courses in Britain seem to be disappearing. Glasgow School of Art and Camberwell College of Art are no longer accepting new students and the University of Westminster is closing its renowned Harrow Ceramics department where Edmund de Waal, creator of Signs and Wonders, studied.

Access to the V&A ceramics collection is free and there is more to come when the final section of the new gallery opens in summer 2010.

Photo of ceramic glazes by Djinn76

Gallery visitors are encouraged to play with the dominoes, making their own connections between writers and politicans, artists and scientists. Personally I fancied bringing together Elizabeth I and Rosa Luxemburg, the red revolutionary who often carried a parasol and founded the Spartacist movement in Berlin.

Cobb’s dominoes are part of the Mythical Lyrical exhibition, which brings together artworks “driven by myth…ancient, cultural or urban”. This is a pretty wide remit, especially if you count religion as myth. Interestingly, with the exception of Faisal Abdu’Allah’s Harlesden street talk take on the Last Supper, the featured artists have avoided/evaded established religion. The closest the exhibition comes to any overt thread linking pieces is a hint of paganism/shamanism.

Half-human, half-animal figures appear in several of the artworks. For me the most accomplished interpretation of this classical theme is Hedley Roberts‘ A Country Alliance (see above). Using digital printing and oil painting Roberts recreates a version of the ancestral portraits used to decorate stately homes and provide a visual record of a family’s history.

Apart from the obvious link between hunter and hunted Roberts’ lord and lady of the manor play around with  settings that we think we know well. The reproduction of William Morris’s ‘Willow Bough’ and ‘Fruit’ designs as a backdrop seems to transport the aristocrats from a story written by one of the Mitford sisters to Hampstead Garden Suburb.

Adding to the sense of displacment the woman, with her red lips and curled hair, looks more like an escapee from a Hollywood film poster than a descendant of the Duke of Whatnotshire. Roberts says he “sourced” her “through Merle Oberon playing George Sand in the 1945 film A Song to Remember”.

Standing before Roberts creation made me feel as though I were in a National Trust shop where the stock had been re-organised by Will Self - confused but more interested than I thought I would be.

If you go to see Mythical Lyrical don’t neglect to look behind the wall made of loaves of bread, an installation by gallery owner Sueli Turner. Tucked away in this little annexe are three “commemorative plates” made by Eric Great-Rex. One is decorated with tree silhouettes, their tall trunks and long branches reminiscent of the plane trees that grace so many London parks. There is a figure hanging from one of the trees’ branches, really no more than a semi-transparent, person-shaped membrane, like a memory of the murdered and suicidal.

The hanging figure reminded me of The Tree That Remembers, a film inspired by the suicide of a young Iranian political activist who was exiled in Canada. It also convinced me that Great-Rex is commemorating a city park, rather than a country scene. After all cities tend to be where people bring dreams and nightmares that don’t always work out as planned.

Mythical Lyrical runs until 23 December 2009.