It’s a reflection of my own cultural biases that when reflecting on the impact of colonialism and the British Empire on botany, of all things, my mind leaps to the introduction of species to the UK. Plants such as fuchsias, geraniums and petunias arrived on our shores through a complex and uncomfortable web of international relations.

This exhibition made me think for the first time about how the movement of species is more complicated than things reaching British gardens. Empire introduced coffee and tobacco to India, for example, which I would ignorantly have assumed were native to India.

But this exhibition is really about reckoning with part of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh’s colonial history. Its collection includes a significant number of botanical drawings by Indian artists commissioned by Scottish doctors employed by the East India Company. Doctors, of course, because the Garden’s primary function was medical. Very little is known about any of the artists: in many cases, not even their names.

This exhibition of their drawings, therefore, becomes not only an appreciation of their inherent beauty and accuracy but also a sad reflection. It reminds the visitor with marvellous clarity of the way that the Empire often failed to recognise the personhood of those on whose remarkable skills and talents it relied.

Connecting histories continues at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh until 14 April.

Back in May, I moaned about the uninspiring decision to rebuild Notre-Dame de Paris to be exactly the same as it was prior to the 2019 fire. In my view, it seemed to be an example of preservation at the expense of conservation, forcing the building into a frozen historical state that bears no relation to the changing needs of the building and the community around it.

Yet, I missed July’s announcement of Guillaume Bardet’s incredible minimalist liturgical furniture which is destined for the interior. The combination of boldness and simplicity is stunning, somehow both timeless and contemporary. The decision to create something functional and new, rather than just blindly replicating what came before, gives me a scintilla of hope about the whole project.

They may only represent a handful of objects, but they are among the most liturgically important objects in the building. Seeing the restoration take such a bold path on such important things gives me faith. Perhaps, after all, it is a more thoughtful restoration than the headlines suggested.

This is the first UK solo exhibition by Jade Sweeting. It features a small selection of 8×10 black-and-white photographs of parts of motorcyclists’ bike jackets and leathers. The pictures are accompanied by an audio recording of motorcycle noises, which the exhibition notes reveal to be from the artist’s own bike.

Unfortunately, this didn’t do anything for me. The notes say that it is ‘erotic, sensual and tender’ and that it explores the artist’s position as a woman in the male-dominated world of motorbikes. I didn’t get any of that; it seemed like a collection of interestingly composed photos of zips and stuff. Perhaps, in part, this is because I have no direct knowledge or experience of the subculture Sweeting explores in this exhibition.

I’m pleased that the artist pursued her vision and that the gallery wasn’t shy of putting on a solo exhibition of work that’s a little less obvious. The result of both things is that some of the work featured will fail to connect with some of the audience. In this case, I’m afraid that applies to me.

900 miles (from Home) continues at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art until 21 January.

The National Glass Centre has curated an exhibition to show the influence of international studio glass styles and techniques on the British studio glass scene. It features work representing the practice in thirty different countries.

Here are three objects that stood out.

This is Dancing Goblets, a 2021 work by Sacha Delabre. Delabre grew up in France and studied for a BA in Glass on the internationally renowned programme at Sunderland University. He now works at the Glass Hub down in Wiltshire.

I’ve previously seen the left-most of the three goblets exhibited on its own. I was taken by its surrealist form. Seeing these three pieces together brings out the dynamism of the dancing. They are wonderful.

I didn’t react as emotionally to this 2016 untitled work by Czechia’s Martin Janecký, but I was amazed. The detail and complexity of the large form seemed incredible.

My visit to the exhibition of work by Neil Wilkin and Rachael Woodman earlier this year taught me something about the challenge of working with glass. It is hard to comprehend how Janecký made such a detailed, lifelike form from such an uncompromising material.

Map of the World, diminished by Inge Panneels is a tiny 2023 work, perhaps only a couple of centimetres square. Slightly cheekily, this work apparently represented Belgium, Scotland and England on the basis that Panneels is from Belgium, taught in Sunderland and works in Scotland.

This stood out to me, combining the aspects I liked in the previous two works. It is surrealist: the practical map is rendered impractical through its tiny size. It’s also an astoundingly detailed representation of a familiar form rendered in an uncompromising material. It’s brilliant.

Glass World continues at the National Glass Centre until 10 March.

I’ve walked past this artwork at Regent Centre station on the Tyne & Wear Metro many times. Yet, it’s only this week that I learned it was by Shepard Fairey, better known for the Barack Obama “Hope” poster.

‘Obey’ was installed in 2006 as part of the Baltic’s ‘Spank the Monkey’ exhibition of urban art, but is still missing from the online list of Metro art works.

Whenever I’m at Schiphol, provided I’m in the non-Schengen zone, I try to make time to pop into the tiny branch of the Rijksmuseum. The current exhibition is ‘Longing for Nature’, and I thought it made quite a nice partner to the ‘Essence of Nature’ exhibition I saw at The Laing earlier this summer.

Whereas ‘Essence of Nature’ was about the changing artistic representations of nature, ‘Longing for Nature’ is about the shifting relationship between humankind and the natural world. The exhibition focuses on the 19th century, which was a period of immense change in this relationship. The exhibition posits that, in the early 19th century, nature was considered indestructible and immutable. The Industrial Revolution clearly challenged that perception.

I think that’s a hard case to demonstrate with such a small exhibition. Yet, I was struck by this painting: Orchard at Eemnes by Richard Roland Holst. From ‘Essence of Nature’ I’d learned about how art moved from aiming to be photorealistic in the pre-Raphaelite era to being more about character and atmosphere later on. Seeing this in the context of ‘Longing for Nature’ made me realise that the latter is filtering the scene through the human experience.

Just as popular perception shifts from nature being immutable to humans having an impact, we also started to consider nature in art through the human experience, rather than appreciating its essential quality. That surely can’t be coincidental.

‘Longing for Nature’ doesn’t have a publicly advertised end date but is on now at Rijksmuseum Schiphol.

‘Essence of Nature’ continues at The Laing until 14 October.

What happens when you take three artists who are used to working in ceramics and give them a ten-day residency at the National Glass Centre? They try to explore ideas in a new material, resulting in an exhibition that—for me, at least—didn’t really work.

The three artists involved were Bouke de Vries, Andrea Walsh and Andrew Livingstone.

Andrea Walsh experimented with the fluidity of glass and ceramic, seeing how each could be made to fold or flex, almost like fabric. Her pieces were mostly tiny and intricate. They felt a bit like the artists’ artist’s response to the challenge, in that they explored the material, but didn’t offer an awful lot to a casual observer like me. I don’t really know how fluid ceramics can be, so a comparison with glass was a bit lost on me.

Bouke de Vries’s work seemed to mostly involve putting ceramic pots in glass boxes, marked with words like ‘fragile’ and ‘handle with care’. I appreciated the whimsy of doing that in glass, but I didn’t get much beyond that. According to the labels, the artist was intending to draw some connection with Vermeer’s Milkmaid, which appeared as four tapestries, but I didn’t really understand how the whole thing was supposed to fit together.

Andrew Livingstone exhibited a bowl of glass emoji-like fruit which I enjoyed, and which was displayed alongside the artist’s earlier painting which featured the fruit. I thought this was an amusing commentary on his style and the artistic process, upending the usual way in which still life art works. Until I read the label, I didn’t realise that there was another sexual layer of meaning in that the fruits are all used in ‘sexting’ and also reference ‘fruit’ as a homophobic slur.

Livingstone also exhibited a glass model of a house in its own section of the gallery, surrounded on the floor by what3words grid references. I had no idea what this was all about: according to the label, it aimed to “explore ceramic and glass as queer politically charged materials.” I didn’t get it, not least as there wasn’t even any ceramic in the piece, as far as I could make out.

All things considered, I suspect this exhibition would be of more interest to those with some background knowledge or experience of working artistically with ceramic or glass than it was to me.

Confluence continues at the National Glass Centre until 10 September.

Weighting Time is an exhibition of Fiona Crisp’s work spread over two different locations on two different sets of dates. I’ve been to see the portion exhibited at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art: the portion at Sunderland Museum has already closed.

This was a small exhibition of photography and film drawn from across Crisp’s thirty-year career. Included were representations of large, deep underground industrial spaces, which contrasted with images of similarly structured above-ground buildings, such as theatres and cathedrals. Both seem like otherworldly spaces.

A film installation took us driving through the Boulby Mine which stretches out under the North Sea, to space imagery travelling through time itself. The industrial aesthetic of the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art complemented the work which also includes structures and seating designed by the artist to help viewers to contemplate the work.

I found this intriguing and enjoyable, though perhaps too small to be fully immersed or to completely appreciate all the ideas Crisp had in mind. Though, that feels like unfair criticism when I have effectively only seen half of the exhibition.

Fiona Crisp: Weighting Time continues at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art until 3 September. A virtual version is also available online, if you’re into that sort of thing.

I told you a few days ago about going to visit a Peter Howson retrospective. While I was there, I saw his 2006 painting of The Last Supper.

While waiting for my train home, I popped into the National Gallery and happened upon Nicolas Poussin’s 1694 painting of (essentially) the same scene, The Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist.

Generally, I prefer more abstract paintings to ones with photo-like realism, but this pairing disproves that rule.

The Howson painting is clearly more abstract, yet I prefer the Poussin. I particularly like Poussin’s use of symbolic light. I also think the composition is clever: unlike most representations of the Last Supper, Poussin has shown the disciples seated around a table. Poussin’s disciples all seem to me to have their own personalities, whereas Howson’s seem more like an indistinct group.

I’ve probably seen more exhibitions this year than in the rest of my life combined, so it’s perhaps not surprising that some of my preconceptions are being challenged—but it nevertheless feels arresting to me!

I don’t proclaim to be an art expert, or even a knowledgable amateur. Prior to visiting this major retrospective exhibition, despite his fame and acclamation, I couldn’t say I knew who Peter Howson was.

Born in London, Howson spent his formative years in Ayrshire before venturing off to study at the Glasgow School of Art. Today, he is a highly celebrated figurative artist.

During the early 1990s, he took on the role of the official ‘British war artist’ for the conflict in Bosnia, an experience that left a profound imprint on his mental and emotional wellbeing. A decade later, he found comfort in Christianity, a shift that brought a religious focus to his work. In recent years, he has crafted artistic responses to Brexit, the pandemic, and various other contemporary events.

Admittedly, Howson’s figurative and almost cartoonish style doesn’t particularly resonate with me. However, in a three-floor mega-exhibition, there are bound to be a few stand-out pieces. Below, I’ve highlighted three artworks that captivated me more than the rest.

This is My Tale Shall Be Told, a 1995 work which is apparently based on William Hogarth’s 1730s series A Rake’s Progress. I’m not familiar enough with art history to appreciate that.

I liked this because of the surrealism and the bold colours. I liked that the girl in the background had a Munch-like scream at the scene of the bearded lady inexplicably attempting to ride a dog. I like the way that the child in the foreground is contorted in a way which looks natural at first glance, but impossible on a closer inspection. The recognisable inclusion of the ‘fat controller’ gave this a grounding in the real world.

I especially enjoyed the way that the paintbrushes were left colourless in such a colourful scene.

This is a 1994 piece from Bosnia, called Serb with Child. I was struck by the abstract nature of this piece, which isn’t typical for Howson. I thought it said something about the way that the anger and violence were more prominent for him than the specifics of the awful situation.

From the same period, this is House Warming. Here, the contrast between the horrific, violent events in the foreground and the everyday scene in the top-left of the canvas is striking.

This helped to bring home to me the reality of living in a war zone. The contrast between everyday life and the battle surrounding it has been much-observed in the current conflict in Ukraine. But, as only art can, I think this representation made me ponder the reality of living through a situation like that.

I also thought that the juxtaposition said something about how close we all are to violent conflict: it seemed like it was commenting on the fragility of society, and how easily any society can tip over into unrecognisable violence.

When the Apple Ripens: Peter Howson at 65 continues at the City Art Centre until 1 October.