Mirrored light, Traveling Light, and Candlelight...the perfect day

Jeremiah read about a Japanese artist (Yoyoi Hasami) exhibiting in London who does installations of small mirrored rooms. We decided we had to check it out! We took the tube to Angel, and an industrial part of London we'd never visited before, to the Victoria Miro gallery. There was a queue of hip, young urbanites outside the door that stretched down the block. We were in the right place.

Once inside we stood in yet another queue to go up the stairs, where were greeted by huge gold polka-dot pumpkins, and yet another queue to step inside the first room.

But it was definitely worth the wait! Her parents raised squash on a farm and she has loved them since she was a little child. She calls them a combination of humble and amusing. She also suffered from hallucinations of repeating patterns in early childhood, and these show up in her work, as you can see.

Next we went back downstairs and waited in another queue before stepping into this room:

She calls it "Candelier of Grief."

Outdoors there was a permanent installation in the water garden called "Where the Lights in My Heart Go."

There was another mirrored room on the patio punctuated with tiny holes of daylight. Inside it feels like you're surrounded by a starlit night sky. Upstairs was a huge gallery filled with a series of paintings she calls "Infinite Nets."

Next adventure: Abbey Road
We took the tube to St John's Wood and walked a few minutes until we arrived at an intersection filled with people taking photographs. First thought: what a let-down. It was just a small crosswalk on a busy street.

Doesn't look like much, but this is Abbey Road Studios, started by Sir Edward Elgar in 1930, and broadcasting source of the famous "King's Speech" in 1939. (Collin Firth spoke into that same microphone in the movie--which, by the way, is rated 15 and up in the UK, and is a must/see.) then four lads from Liverpool auditioned there and changed music history. "Abbey Road" was recorded in 1969, and the studio changed its name from EMI to Abbey Road a year later.

Here's a shot of Jeff and Jeremiah making the obligatory crossing while I risked my life in the middle of the street to take the photo. 😉 We decided Abbey Road was pretty cool after all.

For the final topper we went to St Martin in the Field--a small church adjacent to Trafalgar Square, and one of my favorite venues in London--to hear a candlelight concert of Mozart's Requiem by the Academy Voices. It was sublime. My favorite was the Lachrymosa. And a warm-up piece they did, "Ave Verum Corpus" that was so unbelievably gorgeous it brought me to tears.

Days don't get much better than this! Or end more beautifully.